Rhiannon Giddens and Silkroad Ensemble conclude American Railroad fall tour at BAM in Brooklyn. Carminho is across the river at The Town Hall in NYC. John Adams is performed by the CSO. Laurie Anderson’s ARK: United States V concludes in Manchester. Jeremy Denk joins Fairfax Symphony Orchestra for Beethoven. Mary Halvorson tours Spain and Switzerland. Caroline Shaw is at Cité de la musique in Paris with Roomful of Teeth and Gabriel Kahane. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed in Amsterdam. The Staves are in Denver. Davóne Tines sings Bach at Columbia. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway tour Massachusetts, upstate New York, and Ohio.
Rhiannon Giddens and Silkroad Ensemble, of which she is artist director, conclude the fall leg of their American Railroad tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)’s Howard Gilman Opera House on Saturday. The tour and their new album, American Railroad, released last week, are the culmination of four years of research, collaboration, and music-making, having brought Silkroad artists across the US to uncover and uplift stories of those who built the transcontinental railroad and connecting railways across North America. “Dazzling multi-handed study of a crucial part in US history. This 13-track set is every bit as rich, diverse and exploratory as we might hope for, often breathtakingly so,” says Uncut. “A truly transcendent record that manages to captivate, enlighten and inspire.”
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Across the East River, Portuguese fado singer Carminho brings music from her latest album Portuguesa and more to The Town Hall in New York City on Sunday. Carminho’s new EP, Carminho at Electrical Audio, released earlier this year, was recorded in collaboration with the late Steve Albini at his iconic Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. A music video for the EP track “Deixei a minha casa” filmed in the studio can be seen here.
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Composer John Adams’s Slonimsky’s Earbox is performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hannu Lintu, at Wheaton College’s Edman Memorial Chapel in Wheaton, Illinois, tonight and the CSO’s Symphony Center in Chicago on Saturday. The Nonesuch recording of the piece, performed by the Hallé Orchestra led by Kent Nagano, can be heard on the 2022 forty-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, featuring recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label. Adams’s opera Girls of the Golden West, the first recording of which was released by Nonesuch earlier this year, was just nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Opera Recording and Best Engineered Album, Classical, for engineers Alexander Lipay and Dmitriy Lipay.
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Laurie Anderson’s premiere of her new live stage work, ARK: United States V, and her two-week residency with the piece at the Hall at Aviva Studios in Manchester, England, conclude with shows tonight, Saturday, and Sunday. The piece brings together new and old music, cinematic imagery, stories, and songs at her largest scale yet with contributions from fellow artist Ai Weiwei, the band Sexmob, and Sacred Harp singers from across the country. Anderson’s new album, Amelia, about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight, was released earlier this year; you can get the album—“mesmerizing from the first line to the last," per V magazine—and hear it here.
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Pianist Jeremy Denk joins the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Zimmerman, for a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58 at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts Concert Hall on Saturday. Also on the program are works by Quinn Mason and Rachmaninoff. 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.
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Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson and her trio Thumbscrew—bassist Michael Formanek and drummer and vibraphone player Thomas Fujiwara—are in Europe performing two shows in Spain—at Jimmy Glass Jazz Zbar in Valencia tonight and Teatro Principal in Puerto Real on Saturday—and at KSM 3 Berikon, in Berikon, Switzerland, on Sunday. 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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Caroline Shaw is at Cité de la musique’s Salle des concerts in Paris for two concerts this weekend: with vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth singing her piece The Isle and selections from her Pulitzer Prize–winning Partita for 8 Voices and the French premieres of works by Leilehua Lanzilotti and William Brittelle tonight; and with Gabriel Kahane for the European premiere of their new work Hexagons, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story “The Library of Babel,” on Saturday. Roomful of Teeth can be heard on Caroline Shaw’s new score to Ken Burns’ film LEONARDO da VINCI, along with Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and John Patitucci. The film premiered this week on PBS and is now streaming via PBS.org and the PBS App. Shaw and Sō's new album, Rectangles and Circumstance, just received a Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance.
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Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed by Stichting Ligamenten at the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in Amsterdam tonight. 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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The Staves—the duo of sisters Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor—whose new digital EP Happy New Year is out today, continue their US acoustic tour in support of their latest album, All Now, with a show at the Marquis Theater in Denver tonight. Also out today, the duo released a music video of an acoustic version of their song “After School” from the new EP; you can watch it here. The song was originally released on their album All Now earlier this year. “One of the strongest releases of the band’s career,” Atwood Magazine says of the new album. “A product of passion and perseverance, soul-searching and self-knowing, All Now is an emboldened, cathartic release that sees The Staves basking in beautiful folk rock pastures as they take on the world.”
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Singer Davóne Tines joins the Harlem Chamber Players, conducted by Kent Tiretle, in a performance at Columbia University’s Miller Theater in New York City tonight as part of the ensemble’s annual Bach concert, this year titled Music for a Time of Crisis. On Tines’ solo recording debut, ROBESOИ, released earlier this year, the musician and his band THE TRUTH grapple with the legacy of a hero, exploding the musical repertoire of Paul Robeson. “Tines proves a masterful storyteller whose work is compellingly provocative,” says Mojo in its four-star review. You can hear the album here.
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Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway bring music from their critically acclaimed album City of Gold and more to the Groton Hill Music Center in Groton, Massachusetts, tonight; Electric City in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday; and Marathon Center for the Performing Arts’s Donnell Theater in Findlay, Ohio, on Sunday. Earlier this year, 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. Earlier this week, Tuttle joined Dierks Bentley, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and Sierra Hull at the CMA’s performing Tom Petty’s “American Girl"; you can watch the performance here.
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