Tonight in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Fest, the free, annual weekend-long musical extravaganza, gets under way with T Bone Burnett, Robert Plant, and Alison Krauss headlining the festival's opening night in a 5:15 PM set on the Banjo Stage. Tomorrow, the same stage plays host to Jimmie Dale Gilmore at 11 AM and, at 2:05 PM, Three Girls & Their Buddy, the supergroup of Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, and Buddy Miller. Emmylou takes the stage again for a solo set with Sunday evening, playing the venue's closing set of the festival.

For information on all the festival events, visit strictlybluegrass.com.

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As happened last weekend, both parts of John Adams's Two Fanfares for Orchestra, Tromba Lontana and Short Ride in a Fast Machine, will be performed this weekend by different orchestra, separated by a couple thousand miles. Tonight, the University of British Columbia Ensemble, led by Jesse Read, performs the first at the Chan Center in Vancouver, British Columbia. On Saturday, the San Angelo Symphony Orchestra, led by Hector Guzman, performs the second at the San Angelo City Auditorium in San Angelo, Texas.

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The Black Keys continue their tour, with the Tennessee band The Royal Bangs taking over supporting duties for Jessica Lea Mayfield. The new pairing hits Asheville, North Carolina, tonight for a sold-out show at The Orange Peel. Tomorrow night, they head to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to play the House of Blues, and then back to North Carolina for a Sunday show at the Disco Rodeo in Raleigh.

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Isabel Bayrakdarian begins her North American tour Celebrating Gomidas Vartabed, with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Saturday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. As reported earlier this week, the San Francisco Chronicle finds her "gorgeous, dark-hued tone and communicative power" and the "tender clarity and ripe urgency" of her singing to be well suited to the songs from the tour and on her debut Nonesuch album, Gomidas Songs. On Sunday, she and the orchestra perform at the Orange County Performing Arts Center's Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, California.

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David Byrne's Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno tour across the United States is in California this week. After a performance at Humphrey's by the Bay in San Diego last night, Byrne plays the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles tonight and the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara on Saturday. Byrne heads to San Francisco for two dates at Davies Symphony Hall at the start of next week.

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As reported earlier this week, Ry Cooder plays the second of two rare live appearances tonight, after last night's opener, when he performs again with Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. Proceeds benefit the Richard deLone Special Housing Fund.

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Richard Goode performs works by Chopin and Bach at the University of California–Berkley's Zellerbach Hall on Sunday. The concert will be preceded by a pre-performance talk by musicologist John Prescott.

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Kronos Quartet is in Los Angeles tonight to perform a multinational program titled Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11 at UCLA's Royce Theatre. The program includes works by Osvaldo Golijov and Gustavo Santaolla, Michael Gordon, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Terry Riley, among others. The Quartet will be joined by the Paulist Choristers of California, led by by Luke McEndarfer, for a performance of Aulis Sallinen's Winter Was Hard, which the Quartet recorded for the album of the same name in 1988.

On Saturday, the Quartet performs an extensiev program that includes Steve Reich's Triple Quartet and selections from John Zorn's The Dead Man, among many others, all at the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwild, California.

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Randy Newman will appear as a guest of Craig Ferguson on tonight's episode of the Late Late Show on CBS, following the Late Show with David Letterman. Also on tonight's show is Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho, whose impersonations of her mother and father may very well lead to some interesting discussions about the song "Korean Parents" off Randy's latest album, Harps and Angels.

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Tonight, at the new home of the London Sinfonietta in Kings Place, London, the ensemble performs Steve Reich's Come Out, along with a work by Gavin Bryars, at an 11 PM concert. It will be the fourth of four short concerts the Sinfonietta performs in one night. The performance of Come Out is part of the Daniel Pearl World Music Days, the annual series of concerts taking place all across the globe all month long to promote tolerance.

Also tonight, across the Channel, the Ictus ensemble takes a break from the European tour, with the Rosas dance company, of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Steve Reich Evening, to perform a concert program at the Cité de la Musique in Paris that includes part one of Reich's Drumming.

In New York tonight, Morphoses / The Wheeldon Company, City Center's guest resident company, concludes Program A of its five-night residency, which includes Six Fold Illuminate, a Morphoses commissioned work by Canadian choreographer Emily Molnar featuring Steve Reich's Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards.

Tomorrow night, at the Jewish Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, Reich's Different Trains will be performed by Fleshquartet as part of a "glass concert," designed by the Theatre's director and artistic director, Pia Forsgren, in which the musicians and audience are surrounded by glass shapes in a play with light, harmonies, and shifting transparencies. (Reich was recently appointed to the Swedish Royal Academy of Music.)

Also that night, at the Hume Concert Hall in San Francisco, the San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, led by Andrew Mongrelia, performs Reich's The Four Sections. The performers will give an encore performance of the program there on Monday as well.

On both Saturday and Sunday evenings, the Taos Chamber Music Group opens a new concert season at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, with Point Counterpoint, a program featuring Steve Reich's Vermont Counterpoint, along with works by Boulez and Ravel, among others.

On Sunday, a sold-out performance of Reich's City Life at King's Place in London by the Contemporary Music Group from Trinity College of Music will accompany the screening of a new film of London and will share the bill with new pieces about London's King's Cross by four young filmmakers and composers.

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Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer continue their tour in support of their debut duo disc, out last week on Nonesuch, with two concerts in Oregon: Saturday at the Shedd Institute's Jaqua Concert Hall in Eugene and Sunday at Kaul Auditorium at Reed College in Portland.

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Dawn Upshaw participates in the weekend's New Yorker Festival activities in a talk with recently announced fellow MacArthur "Genius" grant recipient Alex Ross. The discussion takes place Saturday evening at the Joan Weill Center for Dance at the Ailey Citigroup Theater.