Rhiannon Giddens launched a tour of Europe, featuring music from her new album, Freedom Highway, with two sold out shows in Paris last night. The tour continues with two more sold-out shows this weekend: at Amstelkerk in Amsterdam on Saturday and AB Club in Brussels on Sunday.

Freedom Highway was released on Nonesuch last month to 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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Composer John Adams recently celebrated his 70th birthday, and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by David Robertson, continue the celebration, performing his The Gospel According to the Other Mary at Powell Hall tonight and Sunday afternoon. The orchestra brings Adams’s 2012 Passion oratorio to Carnegie Hall next weekend.

Elsewhere, Bonn Opera presents the German premiere of The Gospel According to the Other Mary, in the Peter Sellars production first seen at English National Opera, conducted by Joana Carneiro, at Bonn Theater on Sunday. The Guardian calls the work “a mesmerising aural world.”

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Tyondai Braxton, on a double bill with Brooklyn-based trio Dawn of Midi, launched a five-city tour of the United Kingdom in London and Leeds earlier this week, continuing with shows at The Haunt in Brighton tonight, South Street Arts Centre in Reading on Saturday, and concluding at The Deaf Institute in Manchester on Sunday. HIVE1, Braxton's Nonesuch Records debut album, was released in 2015, with Q magazine calling it "a sonically absorbing experience."

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Jeremy Denk joins the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, as both pianist and director, in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, at Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul this morning, tonight, and Saturday. They bring the music to St. Andrew's Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi on Sunday afternoon. Also on the program is Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in F for Strings and Winds. The Washington Post calls Denk “an artist of uncommon communicative ability, whose playing gives as much intellectual as sensual pleasure.”

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Tigran Hamasyan takes his world tour, featuring music from his forthcoming album, An Ancient Observer, due next week, to France this weekend: playing a sold-out set at Le Trianon in Paris tonight and a show at Théâtre d'Aurillac on Saturday.

An Ancient Observer was featured on Jamie Cullum’s show on BBC Radio 2 this week. Cullum closed out the episode with the first play of the album track “Ancient Observer,” calling Hamasyan “a pianist who touches the piano and immediately establishes himself as a true giant and a true original.” You can hear the show here.

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Kronos Quartet is joined by frequent collaborator Wu Man, the Chinese pipa player and composer, for a performance of her Fifty for the Future commissioned Four Chinese Paintings, as well as A Chinese Home, a multimedia work conceived by Wu Man in collaboration with Kronos’s David Harrington, and director / visual designer Chen Shi-Zheng, at DeBartolo Performing Arts Center in Notre Dame on Saturday. The program also includes a performance of Philip Glass’s Orion: “China.”

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The Magnetic Fields bring the 50 Song Memoir concert tour to the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, this weekend. Performing two nights in each city (songs 1–25 on night one, songs 26–50 on night two), the newly expanded Magnetic Fields septet brings the stage extravaganza, directed by José Zayas, to the Tennessee Theatre for the festival on Saturday and Sunday.

You can watch several music videos for the album that were originally created for the tour on the band’s YouTube channel, where you can also look inside the five-LP edition of 50 Song Memoir in a new unboxing video.

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Conor Oberst is touring the United States with The Felice Brothers as his backing band, performing music from his new album, Salutations. They give a sold-out performance at The Volcano Room at Cumberland Caverns in McMinnville, Tennessee, tonight, to be broadcast at a later date on PBS's Emmy Award-–winning live music series Bluegrass Underground. Next up are shows at The Pageant in St. Louis on Saturday and The Englert Theater in Iowa City on Sunday.

The Sunday Express calls Salutations “quite simply sublime … This is songwriting of the very highest quality, Oberst’s lyrics rarely less than astonishing. Wonderful." The Independent says it's "probably the best work of the singer’s career."

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Saxophonist Joshua Redman takes Still Dreaming, a quartet with trumpeter Ron Miles, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Brian Blade, to Miner Auditorium at SFJAZZ in San Francisco this weekend, with sets tonight, Saturday, and Sunday, with the first two nights featuring a pre-concert talk with the quartet.

Still Dreaming was formed in homage to the late Dewey Redman, Joshua’s father, and his role in the classic Ornette Coleman alumni quartet Old and New Dreams. The Boston Globe calls Still Dreaming an “all-star unit in its own right.” The Mercury News spoke with Redman ahead of this group’s several Bay Area concerts. “This is a major step, because it’s so explicit,” Redman tells the paper’s Andrew Gilbert of his connection to this father’s music. “His influence has always been there. I learned so much listening to him.” You can read what else he had to say here.

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Steve Reich's 1981 piece for voices and ensemble Tehillim (Hebrew for "psalms") is performed by American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall tonight. The concert is part of Reich's residency as holder of Carnegie Hall's Debs Composer's Chair, which continues with Three Generations, a four-concert, Reich-curated exploration of the changing direction of concert music, next week and into April. For more information and to hear Reich discuss the events on WNYC's New Sounds, see yesterday's Nonesuch Journal article.

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Mandolinist/composer/singer/songwriter Chris Thile rounds out his ten-city solo tour of Europe with two-sold out shows this weekend: at Wigmore Hall in London tonight and Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg on Sunday. The Irish Times, in reviewing a show in Dublin earlier this week, called the performance “mesmerizing.” Thile concludes the tour with a performance in Vienna on Monday, before heading out on a US tour with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer behind their forthcoming album, Bach Trios, next month. The trio just released a new track from the album, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 645, which can be heard here.

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Caetano Veloso and Brazilian samba singer Teresa Cristina perform at Cervejaria do Gordo in São Paulo on Saturday.

Veloso and fellow legendary Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil’s live double album, Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música: Multishow Live, was released on Nonesuch last year, as was Cristina’s live album and DVD, Canta Cartola.