Jeremy Denk and friends perform Fauré at Wigmore Hall in London. John Adams is performed in London and Paris. Mary Halvorson is in Colorado. Hurray for the Riff Raff is in the Netherlands. The Magnetic Fields performs 69 Love Songs in Seattle. Natalie Merchant helps get out the vote in Ithaca. Mandy Patinkin and family chat in Concord, NH. Cécile McLorin Salvant tours Germany. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed in Bakersfield, CA. Chris Thile joins Greensboro Symphony in NC. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway are in Arizona and Florida.
Pianist Jeremy Denk joins violinists Joshua Bell and Irène Duval, violist Blythe Teh Engstroem, cellist Steven Isserlis, and fellow pianist Connie Shih for three concerts at Wigmore Hall in London this weekend, with performances continuing until Tuesday. The program consists of alternating works by Fauré—including his Piano Quartet No. 2 in G Minor, which Brad Mehldau performs on his new album Apres Fauré—and a different composer each night, including Reynaldo Hahn, Saint-Saëns, and Nadia Boulanger. Denk’s new album, Ives Denk includes Ives’s four violin sonatas, performed with violinist Stefan Jackiw, and a remastered recording of Denk performing the composer’s first and second piano sonatas. “An album of Ives music, especially one as well played and thought provoking as Ives Denk, is worth engaging with at any time,” NPR says. “That it has been released during an election season fraught with opposing views of what it means to be an American adds a distinct gravitas.” You can get the album and hear it here.
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Composer John Adams’s 1998 piece Hallelujah Junction is performed by pianists Yuja Wang and Vikingur Ólafssoin in sold-out shows at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London, tonight, and Philharmonie de Paris on Sunday. Wang’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic can be heard on the forty-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, released on Nonesuch in 2022. Also in the box set is the Nicolas Hodges and Rolf Hind performance of Hallelujah Junction, from the 2004 Nonesuch album Road Movies.
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Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson joins pianist Myra Melford's Fire & Water Quintet—saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, cellist Tomeka Reid, and dummer Lesley Mok—for a performance at TACAW in Basalt, Colorado, tonight. Halvorson, whose latest album, Cloudward, was released in January, won the 2024 JJA Jazz Award and the DownBeat Critics Poll for Guitarist of the Year.
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Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, brings music from their new album, The Past is Still Alive, to Take Root Festival at De Oosterpoort in Groningen, Netherlands, on Saturday, playing the Great Hall at 9:30pm. Segarra performed the album track “Buffalo” on the Kelly Clarkson Show and released a video for the song, which was filmed inside Chicago’s Field Museum; you can watch both here.
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The Magnetic Fields conclude the US fall leg of their 69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary tour at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle, tonight and Saturday. The concerts feature the full album, all 69 songs, over two nights at each tour stop. “A 172-minute indie rock spectacular,” says the London Times in its review of the band’s shows at Edinburgh earlier this year. “As the crowd erupted into applause and even a few cautious whoops, there was a shared feeling of having witnessed a spectacular of the first order.” The band’s later multi-disc set, 50 Song Memoir, released on Nonesuch in 2017, was just included in the Independent’s list of The 20 Most Underrated Albums: “Every bit as varied, emotional and melody-packed as his more celebrated earlier opus ... An as-yet-undiscovered classic.”
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Natalie Merchant performs in Ithaca, New York, tonight as part of a Get Out the Vote Rally & Concert with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, Senator Lea Webb, and Congressional candidate Josh Riley.
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Mandy Patinkin and his wife Kathryn Grody host a conversation moderated by their son Gideon Grody-Patinkin at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire, tonight. Patinkin will resume his Being Alive tour—a collection of his favorite Broadway and classic American tunes from the likes of Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter, Harry Chapin, and more—later this month.
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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole—are in Germany this weekend, performing at Laeiszhalle in Hamburg tonight and Nikolaisaal Potsdam on Sunday. Salvant was named Female Vocalist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll, and her latest album, Mélusine, made the Jazz Albums of the Year list. “The massively creative vocalist delivers a tour de force in several languages recounting the legend of Mélusine,” the magazine says.
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Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed by Meridian Voices at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Bakersfield, California, on Sunday. The piece is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Its first recording, featuring the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch, was released on New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records in 2020.
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Chris Thile joins the Greensboro Symphony, conducted by Christopher Dragon, at the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday, to perform his piece ATTENTION!—A narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra. Also on the program are Liszt’s Les Préludes and Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, which Thile performs on mandolin with violinist Marjorie Bagley. The San Francisco Classical Voice, reviewing the West Coast premiere of ATTENTION! with Thile and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, called it “always entertaining … an eclectic soup that takes in bluegrass licks, rock, folk, and classical strains.”
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Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway play the Bronco stage at Scottsdale Civic Center in Arizona on Saturday, as part of Dreamy Draw Music Festival, and Seascape Beach in Miramar Beach, Florida, on Sunday, as part of Moon Crush Cowboy Moon Festival. Last month, the band won the IBMA Bluegrass Music Award for Album of the Year for their Grammy-winning album City of Gold and released a six-song EP, Into the Wild. The EP features three new songs—the title track, “Getaway Girl,” and a cover of Kate Wolf’s “Here in California”—as well as previously released covers of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u,” and an alternate version of the City of Gold track “Stranger Things.” You can hear it here.
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