Brad Mehldau revisits his 2010 double album Highway Rider in four performances, beginning last night, and continuing tonight, Saturday, and Sunday at the SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium in San Francisco. As on the album, Mehldau is joined by his Trio—bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard—label mate Joshua Redman on tenor and soprano saxophone, and a chamber orchestra led by conductor Dan Coleman. Drummer Mark Guiliana, who collaborated with Mehldau on Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, takes part as well. SFJAZZ Founder and Executive Artist Director Randall Kline calls Highway Rider “the most important piece of music to ever be performed live at SJFAZZ Center.” The New York Times called it Mehldau’s "grandest effort yet."

Mehldau and Redman take their duo world tour, which began just after the release of their debut duo album, Nearness, last month, to Japan next week. All About Jazz gives it four-and-a-half stars. The Guardian praises the album’s “terse lyricism and harmonic journeys” in its four star review. “Always lyrical, the music nonetheless sometimes sounds at the edge of a precipice—it’s improv in the most exposed of situations.”

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John Adams’s groundbreaking opera Nixon in China is performed by the Royal Swedish Opera, led by director Michael Cavanaugh and conductor Lawrence Renes, in Stockholm tonight. The Boston Globe called the 1987 work “a milestone in American operatic history.” The Grammy Award–winning original cast recording, first released on Nonesuch in 1988, "has an eloquence not since matched," says Los Angeles Times.

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Sam Amidon and Nico Muhly perform at Barbican Hall in London tonight, as part of the Whale Watching Tour: a tenth-anniversary celebration of the record label Bedroom Community. Muhly co-founded the label with Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson, who performs tonight as well, along with violist Nadia Sirota.

Muhly releases Confessions, his album with the Faroese singer/songwriter Teitur, on Nonesuch on October 21. The two will perform music from the album live at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City that night.

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Laurie Anderson and filmmaker Todd Haynes are being honored at the Gala in the Garden benefit for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on Saturday. Acclaimed Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle) will speak in honor of Anderson, and Rufus Wainwright will perform.

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Jeremy Denk begins a five-show run with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, performing works by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Kurtág, at Ordway Concert Hall in St. Paul, Minnesota this morning, tonight, and Saturday. They take the program to Dartmouth and New York City next weekend. The Telegraph gives Denk’s recent recital at Wigmore Hall in London five stars, calling it “exhilarating.”

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Rhiannon Giddens makes her Austin City Limits debut on PBS stations across the United States on Saturday. The set, which she taped while on tour in April, includes songs from her solo debut album, Tomorrow Is My Turn and more. You can catch a sneak peek of the performance here.

"The breadth of musical vision on Tomorrow is My Turn incorporates gospel, jazz, blues and country, plus a hint of proto-rock and roll," says Austin City Limits, "and Giddens displays an emotional range to match her dazzling vocal prowess throughout."

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Emmylou Harris launched an eleven-stop North American tour yesterday, entitled Lampedusa: Concerts for Refugees, with special guests Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, and The Milk Carton Kids. The tour aims to raise awareness for the unprecedented worldwide refugee crisis, with funds going to support Jesuit Refugee Service's educational programs for refugees around the world. Next up are stops at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, on Saturday, and Rococo Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Sunday (minus The Milk Carton Kids). Robert Plant will join for select dates starting next week, as will Joan Baez when the tour visits New York City later in the month.

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Kronos Quartet brings the multimedia work Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 to Royce Hall, as part of CAP UCLA’s 2016–17 season, tonight. The piece, with music by Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and film by Bill Morrison, commemorates the centenary of the First World War. In conjunction with the performance is Art in Action: Hearing Beyond Listening, a week-long series of activities delving into the themes addressed in the piece. The first part of tonight’s program will feature six works, including one world premiere, all commissioned as part of Kronos’s Fifty for the Future project.

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Lake Street Dive brings its current North American tour to a close in the coming days, starting with two home town shows this weekend: at the Wang Theatre in Boston tonight and Radio City Music Hall in New York City on Saturday. The band wraps up this leg of dates with two shows at Philadelphia’s Union Transfer next week and joins Chris Thile for his season-opening show as the new host of A Prairie Home Companion next weekend. The European tour begins in November. Lake Street Dive spoke to the Boston Globe about its Nonesuch debut album, Side Pony, and more ahead of tonight’s show; you can read the article here.

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Conor Oberst continues his tour of intimate solo shows, featuring music from his forthcoming album, Ruminations, with two sets in Texas: at the Granada Theater in Dallas tonight and in Zilker Park in Austin on Saturday, as part of the Austin City Limits festival.

Oberst will perform Ruminations in full at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City on release day, next Friday; the show will be broadcast live on NPR Music, which is currently streaming the album in full.

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Robert Plant headlines filmmaker David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday. He joins Emmylou Harris and others for select dates on the aforementioned Lampedusa Concerts for Refugees tour later this month.

Plant released his Nonesuch debut album, lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar, in 2014. Q calls it "his best solo album yet … a beautifully moving, soul-stirring, bravely genre-blurring album."

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Caetano Veloso and Teresa Cristina continue their world tour with a show at Ebisu Garden Hall in Tokyo, as part of the Montreux Jazz Festival Japan, on Sunday. The duo’s tour, which marks the release of Cristina’s new live album and DVD, Canta Cartola, heads to New York City for two shows at The Town Hall next week. "Canta Cartola feels fully embodied, as if Ms. Cristina had written the songs herself,” says the New York Times of the new album. “There's no sentimental distancing or fetishizing of the songs. She's totally engaged in them; she laughs while singing them, and she dredges the beauty out of them."