Singer/fiddler/banjoist/guitarist Sam Amidon kicks off a European tour at Whelans in Dublin tonight before joining guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Shahzad Ismaily at the Barbican Hall in London on Sunday, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. Frisell and Ismaily can both be heard on Amidon’s new album of reimagined folk songs, Lily-O, recently released on Nonesuch Records. The tour, which continues through the end of the month, stops in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany in the week ahead.

Following the European tour, Amidon has a string of December dates in North America, including an opening spot on night two of Wilco’s sold-out residency at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre on Dec. 6. Amidon returns to the UK to support Sharon Van Etten on select dates in 2015.

Amidon and Frisell recently visited NPR in Washington, DC, to record a performance for the Tiny Desk Concerts series. The session premieres at NPR.org on Monday, December 1. In a review of Lily-O on NPR’s All Things Considered, Banning Eyre says Amidon’s “highly personal approach opens a window on the American past and lets us feel it like nothing else around.”

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John Adams’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer receives the final performance of the season at The Metropolitan Opera in New York City on Saturday. On Monday, Adams curates and hosts Contact! at SubCulture in New York City, a concert featuring musicians from the New York Philharmonic and the New York premiere of Timo Andres’s 2013 piece, Early to Rise.

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The Black Keys take their Turn Blue World Tour to in Texas this weekend, performing at the Toyota Center in Houston on Saturday and the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Sunday. The current leg of the tour, which stops in Austin on Monday, features supporting sets by special guest Jake Bugg.

“The Black Keys whipped the crowd into a frenzy” says TIME of their recent performance at The Concert for Valor to honor America’s veterans and their families on Veterans Day in Washington, DC. The Guardian notes the band’s “ripping through electric sets.”

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Shawn Colvin performs the second and third of three consecutive nights at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis tonight and Saturday. In an intimate solo show, she performs selections from her latest Nonesuch release, All Fall Down, and favorite songs from throughout her career.

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Pianist Jeremy Denk offers a solo recital at the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City on Saturday, marking his only solo recital in New York this season. The program includes Haydn’s Keyboard Sonata in C Major, Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor, Schumann’s Carnaval, and selections from Janáček’s On the Overgrown Path interspersed with works by Schubert.

“It’s kind of a dance suite that I’ve put together,” Denk tells the Globe and Mail about his interweaving of Schubert and Janacek’s selections in a recent performance in Toronto. “The pieces are nearly two centuries distant from each other, but they traffic in anxiety and ambivalence in ways that are sometimes strikingly similar … I want the audience to be unsettled, but in the right way. Part of the aim is this slight uncertainty: ‘Is this Janacek or is it Schubert?’”

Denk also spoke to The Republican about his wide-ranging interests in advance of a concert at the University of Massachusetts last night; you can read the interview at masslive.com.

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Richard Goode performs at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall in Toronto tonight and Sunday afternoon. The program comprises works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, and Schumann.

The Twin Cities’ Pioneer Press says a recent performance in St. Paul “was suffused with grace, subtlety and invariably engaging expressiveness … And the pianist’s straightforward, distraction-free approach worked well for his deeply thought-out interpretations of the works of five composers.” Goode, the paper concludes, is “ one of the modern masters of his instrument.”

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Pianist Tigran Hamasyan, whose Nonesuch Records debut album, Mockroot, is due out in early 2015, continues his European tour at Les Cuizines in Chelles, France, tonight, as part of the jazz festival in Chantereine, and Jazz im Pool in Wolfsburg, Germany, on Saturday. Stay tuned for additional details of the album release to come.

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Kronos Quartet performs at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on Sunday, presented with Ars Musica. On the program are works written for Kronos by Bryce Dessner, Terry Riley, Ryan Brown, Philip Glass, and Mary Kouyoumdjian, as well as Laurie Anderson’s Flow.

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Natalie Merchant joins the Kansas City Symphony for a performance at the Kauffman Center’s Helzberg Hall in Kansas City, Missouri, on Saturday. The program, conducted by James Bagwell, includes selections from her self-titled album, release on Nonesuch Records, as well as favorites from throughout her storied career.

On December 8, Merchant joins label mate Conor Oberst and friends for a Holiday Cheer for WFUV Benefit Concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York City.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—with Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—performs the last of four consecutive nights in Canada at Palais Montcalm in Quebec City tonight. The band heads to the States for a performance at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover, New Hampshire, on Saturday and the Hanover Theatre in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Sunday. The month-long North American tour, which closes out a year-long, worldwide tour, continues in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland and features music from their debut album, Kin (←→).

“It’s a little like if you’re flying over the Earth: you don’t see those country boundaries. That’s the way music is,” Metheny tells the Montreal Gazette about his thoughts on genres. “[I’ve] never loved the idea of these kinds of subdivisions within the context of sound. To be honest, it’s really a political-cultural discussion. It’s not really a musical discussion. For me, music is one thing.” The Ottawa Citizen calls Kin (←→) “a richly orchestrated program of lush, layered and painstakingly crafted music.”

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Randy Newman continues his two-week tour of the United States at the Paramount Theatre in Austin on Saturday. The tour, which features songs from his Nonesuch releases and favorites from throughout his storied career, continues in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.

The Tampa Bay Times—in a review titled “Randy Newman Breaks Hearts; Funnybones in Clearwater”—notes that Newman is “one of the most complex pop craftsman of our time.” You can read the article at tampabay.com.

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters perform a sold-out show at City Hall in Hull tonight and O2 Academy in Glasgow Saturday, as part of their 13-city sold-out tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. The tour continues at O2 Academy venues in Leeds and Newcastle in the days ahead.

Plant spoke with BBC Radio 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie earlier this week, about his new album, lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar, and more. 6 Music also plays samples of “Pocket Full of Golden” and “Turn It Up” from the new album. You can hear what Plant has to say at bbc.co.uk.

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Joshua Redman joins the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and fellow saxophonist Eirik Hegdal for two festival sets this weekend: at Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona tonight, as part of the Barcelona Jazz Festival, and the Centro Cultural Vila Flor in Guimarães, Portugal, on Saturday, as part of Guimarães Jazz. Redman rejoins his Trio, featuring Reuben Rogers on bass and Gregory Hutchinson on drums, for the last leg of its tour in the Midwest in the week ahead.

Redman is also part of the collaborative band James Farm, whose sophomore album, City Folk, was recently released on Nonesuch Records. The Scotsman notes its “inventive improvising and razor-sharp ensemble playing. A pleasingly polished and multi-faceted set.”

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Stephen Sondheim’s first musical, Saturday Night, written in 1954 but unproduced until 40 years later, receives its final performances by The York Theatre Company at St. Peter’s Church in New York City tonight, Saturday, and Sunday. This marks the first New York production of Saturday Night since its area premiere in 2000, of which Nonesuch released the cast recording.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama named Sondheim one of the 19 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The medals will be presented in a ceremony at The White House on November 24.

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Sara Watkins performs selections from her Nonesuch albums, Sun Midnight Sun and her self-titled label debut, and more at The Grand Annex in San Pedro, California, tonight. She has just announced a European tour with Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O'Donovan for April and May.