Tigran Hamasyan, currently on a world tour featuring music from his forthcoming album, An Ancient Observer, due March 31, plays two sold-out shows on the West Coast this weekend: at Michelle’s Pianos in Portland tonight and Yoshi’s in Oakland on Sunday. He brings the music to the East Coast next week for shows at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston and SubCulture in New York City next weekend before heading to Europe later this month.

Hamasyan unveiled the music video for "The Cave of Rebirth," a song from An Ancient Observer, last week. "As a pianist and composer, he draws inspiration from jazz, folkloric and classical sources, in ways that feel both hypermodern and practically ageless," writes NPR's Nate Chinen, who premiered the video via WBGO. "This synthesis is well captured in the video." You can watch it here and download the song, along with the previously released “Fides Tua,” when you pre-order the album on iTunes or the Nonesuch Store.

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Composer John Adams, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his groundbreaking opera Nixon in China, which turns 30 this year, at Walt Disney Concert Hall tonight and Sunday afternoon. The Grammy Award–winning first recording, released on Nonesuch in 1988, "has an eloquence not since matched," says Los Angeles Times.

Elsewhere, Adams’s milestone birthday is celebrated with a performance of his dramatic symphony Scheherazade.2 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, featuring violinist Leila Josefowicz and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on Sunday. Nonesuch released the first recording of the piece with Josefowicz and the St. Louis Symphony led by David Robertson, in September. The San Francisco Chronicle calls it a "thrillingly inventive new work [that] grabs the listener right from the opening measures ... There’s something happening all the time, and all of it is riveting."

A John Adams at 70 concert at the Barbican in London last week, featuring his Chamber Symphony and Grand Pianola Music, Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, and the world premiere of Timo Andres’s Steady Hand, performed by Britten Sinfonia, Andres, and others, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s In Concert. You can listen again at bbc.co.uk.

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Laurie Anderson brings The Language of the Future to Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as part of the Transmediale Festival, on Saturday and Sunday. The piece is Anderson’s ongoing exploration of the American narrative and how it is told, a collection of songs and stories about contemporary culture that crosses borders between dreams, reality, and the elusive world of information. The DC Metro Theater Arts calls the project “profoundly provocative,” adding that Anderson “delivers her stories in a simple, arresting style, sincere and seemingly without polish.”

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Devendra Banhart, currently touring North America with music from his new album, Ape in Pink Marble, performs at Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis on Sunday. Uncut calls the new album "excellent," praising Banhart as an “accomplished shaper of moods and atmosphere.”

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Jeremy Denk joins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Danzmayr, in a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F Major, at Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver on Saturday. “Mozart’s music is voices,” the pianist tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “like an incredible plurality, like a democracy … He captures the whole gamut of human experience.” Also on the program are Shostakovich’s Festive Overture and Symphony No. 12 in D minor, The Year 1917.

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Rhiannon Giddens concludes her brief Northeast run of duo dates with multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell this weekend: at Club Helsinki in Hudson tonight, Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord on Saturday, and Infinity Hall in Hartford on Sunday. Giddens heads to Europe later this month to begin an extensive, full-band tour in support of her new album, Freedom Highway, which comes to the United States in April.

Freedom Highway, which Giddens co-produced with Powell, was released on Nonesuch last week. The record has received major critical acclaim, with the Guardian calling it a “powerful and timely set” and Uncut naming the "remarkably wise and timely new album" its Album of the Month. Pitchfork exclaims: "Rhiannon Giddens emerges as a peerless and powerful voice in roots music,” while the Wall Street Journal concludes: "Detailed, strongly conceived and powerful in its music, singing and songs, Rhiannon Giddens’s Freedom Highway will get to you, and stick with you."

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Kronos Quartet performs at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, DC, on Saturday. Included on its typically eclectic program are Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet and Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes, and works from Kronos’s Fifty for the Future commissioning project, including the world premiere of a new work by Yotam Haber and pieces by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and Aleksander Kościów.

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Lake Street Dive continues its US tour, featuring music from its 2016 Nonesuch debut album, Side Pony, with two sold-out shows at First Avenue in Minneapolis, tonight and Saturday, and another sold-out show at Wooly’s in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday. The Boston Globe calls Side Pony an "exuberant, harmony-rich blend of pop, soul, and jazz.” Billboard, in a review of the band’s show in Brooklyn last weekend, says “Lake Street Dive electrifies…”

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Pianist Brad Mehldau, joined by clarinetist Joris Roelofs and violinist Michael Wilson, performs his own score to Josef von Sternberg’s 1925 film The Salvation Hunters live to a screening of the film at Philharmonie Luxembourg on Saturday. Mehldau embarks on a solo US run next week.

Mehldau was nominated for the Jazz FM Awards 2017 International Artist of the Year earlier this week. He was previously nominated for two ECHO Jazz 2017 awards for Nearness, his debut duo album with label mate Joshua Redman: International Ensemble of the Year and International Piano Instrumentalist of the Year (Redman is up for International Saxophone Instrumentalist of the Year).

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The Staves continue their North American tour in the South this weekend, with shows at Gasa Gasa in New Orleans tonight, The Syndicate in Birmingham on Saturday, and 3rd & Lindsley in Nashville on Sunday. The trio released two new tracks earlier this month: "Tired As Fuck" and "Train Tracks." You can download the two songs from iTunes and the Nonesuch Store, listen on Spotify and Apple Music, and watch a video for the first track here.