The state of Missouri is host to three events of interest to readers of the Nonesuch Journal this weekend: Alarm Will Sound, Kronos Quartet, and Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Alarm Will Sound continues its ties to the show-me state with another season of concerts at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis starting tonight, as part of the venue’s six-hour marathon celebration of the city’s 250th anniversary and its rich musical traditions. The 20-member ensemble, which performs the title track on Steve Reich’s new album, Radio Rewrite, returns to the venue to perform works by Ives, Peter Martin, and the group’s own Stefan Freund. Also part of the city’s celebratory events, billed as “STL250,” Alarm Will Sound inaugurates the new Public Media Commons space in downtown St. Louis with a free show on Sunday, giving the premieres of two works written for the ensemble: John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds, based on the native songbirds of the state, and Missouri-based N.N.N Cook’s Rising/Falling. Alarm Will Sound returns to the Sheldon in December.

Straight across the state in Kansas City, Kronos Quartet performs Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts’ Helzberg Hall on Saturday. The piece is a multimedia piece from Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov, filmmaker Bill Morrison, and Iraq War veteran-turned-visual artist Drew Cameron, commemorating the centennial of the outbreak of The Great War. Also on the eclectic program are works by Wiley, Ravel, Webern, Ives, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, a Byzantine chant, and two pieces that can be found on Kronos’s latest Nonesuch release, A Thousand Thoughts.

Midway between those events across I-70 in Columbia, Carolina Chocolate Drops take their fall tour to The Blue Note in Columbia on Saturday, then head east for a sold-out show at Off Broadway in St. Louis on Sunday, not far from where Alarm Will Sound performs. The Chocolate Drops play a set at the Harvest Music Festival at Mulberry Mountain in Ozark, Arkansas, tonight and continue on to Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio in the week ahead.

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John Adams leads the Yale Philharmonia with the Brentano String Quartet (currently artists -in-residence at Yale) at Woolsey Hall on the campus in New Haven tonight, as part of his weeklong residency at Yale. (Adams received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the university last year.) The program features his own 2011 piece Absolute Jest—a work inspired by late Beethoven scherzos—and is bookended by Stravinksy’s Orpheus and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. You can hear the performance on Yale’s livestream at music.yale.edu/livestream.

Adams brings both ensembles to Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York City on Sunday to kick off the “Yale in New York” concert series with a performance of tonight’s program.

The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’s opera about the 1985 terrorist hijacking of the Achille Lauro ocean liner, receives its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Monday.

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Sam Amidon continues his fall tour with a sold-out show at the FringeArts in Philadelphia tonight and a concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn on Saturday. He is joined for both sets by guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Shahzad Ismaily, who perform on Amidon’s new album of reimagined folk songs, Lily-O, released last month on Nonesuch Records (the vinyl is due October 27). The US leg of the tour rounds out in the US Northeast with dates in Massachusetts and Amidon’s home state of Vermont through the end of the month.

“I’ve never been someone who comes in with an arrangement. I’ve always just chosen the people carefully and let them do what they hear, and that’s exactly what happened here,” Amidon tells the Hartford Courant about recording the new album. “When I tour, it’s the same way: people have the room to do whatever they want. The folk songs themselves have this sort of tough quality. They’ve been worked and worked and worked for hundreds of years. They can withstand a lot.”

Amidon was the guest on NPR's World Cafe, performing songs from the new album. You can hear the episode at npr.org.

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Devendra Banhart and longtime friend, musical collaborator, and fellow singer-songwriter Andy Cabic kick off a California duo tour with performances in three cities: a sold-out show at the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum tonight; an all-ages set at the Gundlach Bundschu Winery in Sonoma on Saturday; and The Center for the Arts in Grass Valley on Sunday. They perform both individually and together in a casual mix of older and newer material, including Banhart’s 2013 Nonesuch Records debut album, Mala. The tour continues in Chico, Felton, and Big Sur in the week ahead.

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Shawn Colvin brings the music of her latest Nonesuch release, All Fall Down, and favorite songs from throughout her career to Club Helsinki in Hudson, New York, on Saturday and The State Theatre in State College, Pennsylvania, on Sunday.

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Jeremy Denk makes his debut with the New York Philharmonic in three nights of concerts at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City that began last night and continue through Saturday. Denk joins the orchestra to perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1; the Philharmonic, led by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, also performs the Overture to Beethoven’s King Stephen and Stravinsky’s first ballet, The Firebird, in full.

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Emmylou Harris performs the song "Big Black Dog," from her album Hard Bargain, in a concert and adoption event at Crossroads Pets in Nashville on Saturday. The event is being taped for future broadcast as part of the PBS series Shelter Me. Sadly, Bella, Harris's dog who inspired the song, passed away earlier this week.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—closes out its tour of Asia with a set at the JZ Festival taking place at the Shanghai BMW Experience Center in China tonight, offering an Opening Gala performance for an audience of lucky ticket winners. The concert marks Metheny's first in China. The group launches a four-city tour of Australian tour on October 20, with stops in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Canberra, culminating with a performance at the Sydney Opera House on October 24.

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Joshua Redman Trio with Reuben Rogers and Gregory Hutchinson holds a residency at Blues Alley—where the trio recorded half of Redman’s new album, Trios Live—in Washington, DC, with two sets each night tonight, Saturday, and Sunday. The fall tour continues with multi-night runs in Boston and New York City in the weeks ahead.

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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Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer, who performed at The Town Hall in New York City last weekend, bring selections from their recent Nonesuch recording, Bass & Mandolin, and more to the Symphony Center in Chicago tonight.

The Boston Globe says their performance in Boston last weekend was a display of “uncommon genius.” Globe correspondent David Weininger, who calls their new album “excellent,” notes “a remarkable musical fluidity and ease, both in their individual playing (they wear their virtuoso abilities lightly) and in the way they work together, each shifting effortlessly from foreground to background to make space for the other’s voice. The way they read each other bespeaks more than a decade of work together.” Read the complete concert review at bostonglobe.com.

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Sara Watkins and her brother Sean (who form Nickel Creek with Chris Thile) return to Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles for their regular musical series The Watkins Family Hour on Saturday. This weekend, Sam Phillips, who released three albums on Nonesuch between 2001 and 2008, joins the siblings along with other special guests.