Jeremy Denk begins as Artistic Partner of Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra with five concerts in the Twin Cities ... John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer continues at The Met ... Sam Amidon concludes US tour in Cambridge ... Laurie Anderson is in California ... Timo Andres is in Chicago ... The Black Keys resume North American tour ... David Byrne joins Here Lies Love cast in NYC ... Carolina Chocolate Drops are in Ohio ... Richard Goode plays Schubert in California ... Emmylou Harris pays tribute to Everly Brothers ... Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica tour Middle East ... Natalie Merchant is in Westhampton ... Brad Mehldau solos in France ... Pat Metheny Unity Group closes out Australia tour ... Nico Muhly piece premieres in Liverpool ... Joshua Redman Trio is in Boston ... Wilco plays sold-out anniversary show in Raleigh ... and more ...
Pianist Jeremy Denk begins his tenure as the newest Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) with a five-concert run performing Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 in their Twin Cities home in Minnesota this weekend: at the Ordway Music Theater in St. Paul this morning, tonight, and on Saturday, and the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon. Also on the program is Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony No. 3, as well as two works by Ives: Largo and In the Barn. SPCO Principal Bassoon Charles Ullery engages in a public conversation with Denk directly before both concerts today.
Denk has performed with the orchestra many times in recent years, including performances last season of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25. “Rehearsing Mozart with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra last fall was one of my happiest experiences,” says Denk; “they have the kind of openness and freedom that I have always dreamed of in a relationship with an orchestra. I am excited to pursue various musical curiosities and enthusiasms with them, to create interesting programming, and, most importantly, to have fun.” He goes on to perform the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 with the Los Angeles Symphony in the week ahead.
The pianist, who marks his first appointed position with an orchestra this weekend, recently made his debut with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. Reviewing his performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, the New York Times wrote: “Mr. Denk played Beethoven’s cadenzas, making them sound even more radically original than they were at the time.” You can read the full review at nytimes.com.
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John Adams’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer receives another performance at The Metropolitan Opera in New York City tonight, following the Met premiere earlier this week.
“This is one of Mr. Adams’s most inspired and personal scores,” writes the New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini in his review this week, “with episodes of haunting, hazy music in which, over subdued, ominous, sustained bass tones in the orchestra, instruments spin out melodic lines full of ancient-sounding curlicues. And Ms. Goodman’s poetic libretto, though often enigmatic, is powerfully so.” Read the complete review at nytimes.com.
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Sam Amidon concludes the US leg of his fall tour with two sets at Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, performing music from his new album of reimagined folk songs, Lily-O (the vinyl edition of which is due out on Monday). The album features jazz guitarist/composer Bill Frisell, a longtime hero of Amidon's, along with Amidon’s other frequent collaborators, bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Chris Vatalaro. “Amidon and a group of trusted players perform Lily-O with an immense, artistic daring,” says Paste. He kicks off a European tour in Dublin on November 14.
Amidon was the guest on NPR’s World Cafe last week, joined by Frisell, to perform four songs from the new album. The two also talk with World Café host David Dye about the recording process in Iceland and more. You can hear the complete session at npr.org.
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Laurie Anderson performs her piece The Language of the Future in Weill Hall of Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center in Rohnert Park, California, on Saturday. She performed the piece last night in Texas and takes it to The Birchmere in Alexandria, Viriginia next week.
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Timo Andres and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), of which he is a core member, perform at Constellation in Chicago on Sunday. The program features the music of Joseph Byrd, written during the three years he spent in New York City in the early ‘60s. Andres’s latest album, Home Stretch, was released in 2013 on Nonesuch Records.
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The Black Keys resume their North American tour at the Target Center in Minneapolis tonight, before heading north to kick off a brief tour of Canada at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg on Saturday. This leg of the tour features supporting sets by special guest Jake Bugg. The Turn Blue tour continues in Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver in the week ahead.
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David Byrne and members from the New York cast of his musical Here Lies Love stop by the Apple Store in New York City's SoHo neighborhood Saturday afternoon to discuss the musical with Michael Riedel, host of PBS's Theater Talk, and give a brief performance. Here Lies Love is now playing at The Public Theater in New York and the National Theatre in London.
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Carolina Chocolate Drops close out their US fall tour at Miami University Hamilton’s Parrish Auditorium in Hamilton, Ohio, tonight. They perform selections from their latest Nonesuch album, Leaving Eden, and much more. The band will join Old Crowe Medicine Show for two nights at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville at the end of the year.
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Richard Goode performs at two California universities this weekend: California State University’s Fresno Hall in Frenso tonight and the University of California’s Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley on Sunday afternoon. The all-Schubert program comprises the composer’s last three piano sonatas: No. 19 in C Minor, No. 20 in A Major, and No. 21 in B-flat Major, all of which Goode has recorded for Nonesuch Records.
In advance of his Bay Area performance, the pianist recently told the San Francisco Classical Voice: “Taking on this challenge of playing these three last sonatas together is something very personally important for me. I’ve played all three of them separately many times, but I’ve always wondered whether I would have the emotional concentration required to play them together at one time—the extreme emotional range.”
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Emmylou Harris performs at the PlayhouseSquare in Cleveland on Saturday, as part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Music Masters tribute concert to the Everly Brothers, for which Rodney Crowell serves as musical director. Fans around the world can tune in as the event is streamed live screen.yahoo.com/live, starting at 7:55 PM ET Saturday. Harris and Crowell released a Grammy Award-winning duo album, Old Yellow Moon, on Nonesuch Records last year.
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Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra are touring the Middle East this week, performing at the Cairo Opera House in Egypt tonight, followed by a concerts in Abu Dhabi and Oman next week. On the program are the Four Seasons of Vivaldi and PIazzolla, which Kremer and the orchestra recorded for their 2000 Nonesuch album Eight Seasons, and Philip Glass’s own The American Four Seasons.
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Natalie Merchant, whose new, self-titled album was released earlier this year on Nonesuch Records, performs a sold-out show at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Long Island on Saturday .
Across the Atlantic, Merchant’s music is featured in an immersive dance theater performance—The Adventures of Isabel—at The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen, Scotland, this afternoon. Performed by DanceLive for young children, the show, which takes its title from a song off of Merchant’s 2010 Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep, is, like the ablum, “inspired by poetry about childhood.”
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Brad Mehldau performs a solo concert at Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, France, on Saturday. He kicks of a month-long European duo tour with Chris Thile on Monday.
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Pat Metheny Unity Group—Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—concludes its four-city Australian tour at the Sydney Opera House tonight. “I am not a huge fan of the whole idea of ‘genre’ or styles of music,” Metheny recently told the Canberra Times. “To me, music is one big universal thing. The musicians I have admired the most are the ones who have a deep reservoir of knowledge and insight not just about music, but about life in general, and are able to illuminate the things that they love in sound … I feel like I am a musician in this broad sense first.”
The Unity Group, which released its debut album, Kin (←→), earlier this year on Nonesuch Records, makes a stop in Singapore on Monday before launching the next leg of its North American tour on November 11.
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Nico Muhly’s piece Second Service—based on the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis canticles—receives its world premiere by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (which commissioned the piece for its 175th anniversary) at the Liverpool Cathedral on Saturday. Also on the program, led by conductor Vasily Petrenko, are works by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Strauss.
Muhly’s opera Two Boys—recorded live during the Metropolitan Opera’s 2013 production with conductor David Robertson—was released on Nonesuch Records last month.
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The Joshua Redman Trio with Reuben Rogers and Gregory Hutchinson—which can be heard on Redman’s recent Nonesuch release, Trios Live—performs at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston with two sets each tonight and Saturday, and one set on Sunday. The fall tour continues with a multi-night run at the Village Vanguard in New York City through the beginning of November.
Redman is also part of a collaborative band James Farm, whose sophomore album City Folk is out on Monday. The Buffalo News lauds the album as “the second first-rate disc by one of the more impressive jazz quartets to come together in the past few years.”
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Wilco performs a sold-out show at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday. They close out the month with a three-night sold-out run at The Capitol Theatre in upstate New York.
Nonesuch will release two new Wilco collections on November 17 in conjunction with the Chicago band’s 20th anniversary: Alpha Mike Foxtrot, a 4-CD/4-LP box set of rare studio and live recordings collected from the band’s extensive audio archives, and What’s Your 20?, a 2-CD compilation of essential tracks culled from the band’s previously released studio recordings.
In early December, Wilco will continues its string of anniversary concerts with six sold-out shows at the Riviera Theatre in their home city of Chicago. Set lists will change each night and feature songs from every era of Wilco’s two-decade career.
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