The 2014 New Yorker Festival gets underway tonight and continues through the weekend at venues throughout New York City. Included among this year’s participants are Randy Newman, Jeremy Denk, Laurie Anderson, and Stephen Sondheim.

Randy Newman and Stephen Sondheim help kick off the weekend’s events with concurrent conversations tonight: Newman talks with New Yorker editor Susan Morrison at the Gramercy Theatre, while Sondheim engages in a conversation with New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik at SIR Stage37.

Sunday’s schedule offers two events back-to-back: pianist Jeremy Denk, a contributor to The New Yorker, presents a talk invitingly titled Comedy and Convention from Mozart to Seinfeld in the SVA Theatre 2 that afternoon, after which Laurie Anderson joins New Yorker music critic Alex Ross in conversation, also at the SVA Theatre 2, in the early evening.

Prior to her New Yorker Festival event, Laurie Anderson joins Kronos Quartet to perform her new piece, Landfall, at Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday. Anderson spoke with the Columbus Dispatch about the piece and collaborating with Kronos in an interview you can read at dispatch.com. They bring the piece to Austin on Tuesday.

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Sam Amidon kicks off a fall tour of the US and Europe with an all-ages performance featuring a very special surprise guest at Ballard Homestead in Seattle on Saturday. The tour, in support of his recently released Nonesuch album, Lily-O, which the New York Times describes as “hauntingly beautiful,” continues down the West Coast with shows in San Francisco (with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Shahzad Ismaily, who perform on the album) and Los Angeles in the week ahead.

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Carolina Chocolate Drops headline the LA Bluegrass Situation at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles tonight, a two-day roots festival. Also on tonight’s bill: Josh Ritter, Old Crow frontman Willie Watson, and recently announced additions to the line-up, Sara Watkins and Sean Watkins. The Drops continue their fall tour out West at The Rialto Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, followed by a string of Texan shows in the week ahead.

Sara Watkins goes on solo to perform at the Pepperdine University Center for the Arts’ Smothers Theatre in Malibu on Saturday.

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Pianist Richard Goode performs at Duke University’s Baldwin Auditorium in Durham, North Carolina, tonight. On the program is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 10 in G Major—which he recorded as part of his famed Beethoven: The Complete Sonatas box set on Nonesuch Records in 1993—as well as Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces and two of Schubert’s last piano sonatas, No. 20 in A Major and No. 19 in C Minor, which he has also recorded for Nonesuch.

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Jonny Greenwood and soloists from the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO) join forces to perform at The Albert Hall in Manchester, England, tonight. The program features Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, which Greenwood recorded for the just-released Nonesuch album Radio Rewrite (the title track was inspired by two songs by Radiohead).

Tonight’s performance also includes the premiere of new material by Greenwood and music from three film soundtracks by the Radiohead guitarist and composer, all of which were released on Nonesuch Records: writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s films The Master (2012) and There Will Be Blood (2007) and director Tran Anh Hung’s 2011 film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel Norwegian Wood. (The LCO performs on the most recent of these recordings, The Master.)

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Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica orchestra kick off a six-city tour with pianist Martha Argerich close to home, in the Baltics: at the Vilnius Congress Concert Hall in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Saturday, and the Cesis Concert Hall in Cesis, Latvia, on Sunday. The tour—comprising works by Beethoven, Bartók, and Mozart—rounds out in Germany, Spain, and Italy before the end of the month.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—concludes the Japanese leg of its Asian tour in three different cities: at Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo tonight; Meitetsu in Nagoya on Saturday; and the Oriental Theatre in Kobe on Sunday. The tour, in support of the band’s debut album, Kin (←→), released this past February on Nonesuch Records, heads to Shanghai next weekend, followed by a tour of Australia.

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Conor Oberst plays a set at the Corona Capital Music Festival in Mexico City on Saturday, bringing the music of his Nonesuch debut album, Upside Down Mountain, and more to the Corona Light Stage.

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Robert Plant, who was the guest on The Colbert Report last night and gave a special late-night set at the Brooklyn Bowl, will engage in a TimesTalk at TheTimesCenter with the Times' chief pop music critic Jon Pareles this evening. The event is sold out, but fans around the world can watch as the event is streamed live at timestalks.com starting at 6:30pm tonight.

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Joshua Redman Trio—with Reuben Rogers on bass and Gregory Hutchinson on drums—continues its fall tour of the US with a three-night residency at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley in Seattle this weekend, offering two sets tonight, two sets on Saturday, and one early set on Sunday. The trio heads next to Washington, DC, to perform another round of sets at Blues Alley, where the trio recorded half of its new album, Trios Live.

Redman is also part of the collaborative band James Farm, whose sophomore album City Folk is due out on Nonesuch Records on October 27.

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Steve Reich joins the Colin Currie Group to give the world premiere of his own Quartet at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on Sunday. Also on the all-Reich program are Clapping Music, Sextet, and Mallet Quartet. The composer, whose new album, Radio Rewrite, was released last week, participates in a free pre-concert talk with Southbank Centre’s Head of Classical Music Gillian Moore.

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Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer bring their North American tour to The Town Hall in New York City on Saturday after performing upstate at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy tonight. The duo, which just released the album Bass & Mandolin, offers a set at the Sanders Theatre in Boston on Sunday before heading to the Midwest.

“Meyer and Thile lit into their music with precision and—better than precision—gusto,” says the Richmond Times-Dispatch of their recent performance there. “It was showman’s music, full of sleights-of-hand and rabbits-in-hats. And this was a showman’s show. Meyer and Thile elicited more genuine laughs from the audience than any concert of double bass and mandolin has a right to.”

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Rokia Traoré performs a brief set and gives a talk at the Barbican Centre in London on Sunday, as part of the Observer Ideas Festival, a day-long festival featuring artists and thinkers from a wide range of disciplines.