Wilco's European tour comes to a close this week with two shows in the Netherlands. Tonight's concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam will be webcast live on the band's site. There are already more live performances planned for next year, including a gala benefit honoring Neil Young as MusiCares Person of the Year during Grammy week, a Canadian tour, and, now, the End of the Road Festival in England, which the band will headline next September.

Stephen Sondheim talks with Frank Rich in Boston ... John Adams receives NEA Opera Honors Award ... Dan Auerbach's tour continues in Maryland and North Carolina ... Christina Courtin comes to NYC's Housing Works Café ... Autumn in Normandy fest celebrates Philip Glass ... Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller play two shows in Boise ... Brad Mehldau Trio, Wilco are in Italy ... Natalie Merchant launches London Jazz Fest ... Youssou N'Dour sings in Dar es Salaam ... Allen Toussaint has two shows in Spain ... Dawn Upshaw joins LA Phil ... and more ...

Wilco's European tour concludes in the Netherlands next week, where the band will webcast Monday night's show in Amsterdam live. The group's much-anticipated contribution (with Feist and Jamie Lidell) to Beck's Record Club is now available: "Little Hands" from the 1969 Skip Spence album Oar. Also on the covers front, Peter Gabriel's forthcoming covers album will include songs by The Magnetic Fields and Randy Newman.

John Adams will be at the Art Institute of Chicago this evening to give the Chicago Humanities Festival's President's Lecture: Where Music and Literature Collide. On Saturday, he will be at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, to receive the 2009 NEA Opera Honors Award at a ceremony hosted by actor/singer Brian Stokes Mitchell and soprano Shirley Verrett.

Youssou N'Dour's recent 50th birthday was marked with a cover article from Songlines and a BBC radio documentary. "I'd never heard a voice like it," Peter Gabriel tells the BBC of first hearing Youssou's music, "so smart and emotional at the same time." Youssou is due to perform at an event by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this weekend and will receive the Medal of Honor from Lille, France, during next week's World Forum Lille.

The Low Anthem is set to close out its tour with Blind Pilot at the Paradise in Boston tonight. Earlier this week, during a stop in Charlottesville, Virginia, the band taped a performance of "To Ohio" for WNRN now on YouTube. The Boston Herald tracks the band's rise to larger venues while retaining the "crackling Americana ethos" fans and critics have come to appreciate. The band has contributed a track to Hard Rock's benefit album to fight hunger and poverty.

Sesame Street celebrated its 40th anniversary on Tuesday, and Kronos Quartet has offered its own best wishes by revisiting its appearance on the show. In 1987, the group stopped by Sesame Street to talk with Big Bird about the string quartet, becoming in the process one of the few groups who could possibly perform "Purple Haze," the Jimi Hendrix classic, so fittingly on the show.

Punch Brothers recently announced via Twitter that they've "just put the finishing touches on the 18th of 18 songs that we've earmarked for our new record." Even with that to look forward to, the band also has two New York performances of A Prairie Home Companion coming in early December. Until then, Paste has published a video interview with the Punch Brothers from the CMJ music conference in which the guys give some insight into their instruments.

Steve Reich's Drumming, once described by the New York Times as a piece that "inhabits our bones and viscera," makes novelist Kim Echlin's playlist in the Times blog Paper Cuts. "It is gorgeous process music," she writes, "lasts about an hour ... and you feel surprised, as if suddenly waking from a brief dream, when it is over." So Percussion performs the piece in an all-Reich program at Stanford in January, at which the composer joins on his Clapping Music.

Dan Auerbach brings his tour to New York City's Webster Hall tonight. Things kicked off last week in Columbus, Ohio, with what UWeekly calls "a very intimate show and one that you should be kicking yourself for if you missed it." The Boston Herald calls Monday's set at the Paradise in Boston an "exhilarating" show, at which "Auerbach opened the sonic floodgates."

While Kronos Quartet was in New York City last week for a performance at Carnegie Hall, it's unclear whether members of the group stopped by this particular New York food-cart vendor to sample the city's finer fare. Though we at the Nonesuch Journal are unprepared at this time to endorse this product, we are happy to heed its advice and always "Ask for a Kronos!"

Nonesuch Records is set to release Realism, the new album from The Magnetic Fields and the band's follow-up to the 2008 album, Distortion, on January 26, 2010. More information will be forthcoming very shortly, but in the mean time, we've got the cover at left and a list of the album's 13 track titles.