Kronos Quartet performs at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz, California, on Sunday, as part of Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. The program opens with “Good Medicine” from Terry Riley’s Salome Dances for Peace and includes and a new work written by Polish composer Aleksander Kościów, based on a traditional Polish folk dance, the oberek, meant as a musical gift to Riley, who turned 80 in June. (Kronos released a five-CD box set of Riley recordings, One Earth, One People, One Love, which included Salome Dances for Peace, on Nonesuch in June.) The evening also includes a work written for Kronos by Cabrillo composer-in-residence Nathaniel Stookey, and works by Mark Applebaum, Laurie Anderson, and Mary Kouyoumdjian.

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Louis Andriessen’s opera La Commedia is featured on BBC Radio 3’s Hear & Now Saturday night, as part of the program’s new Modern Muses series. Nonesuch Records released a two-CD-plus-DVD set of the composer’s film opera collaboration with director Hal Hartley last year. The Los Angeles Times has called it "the greatest opera of the century so far."

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The Arcs give their first-ever live performance at Escpacio 1839 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles tonight. The show is a celebration of artists El Oms' completing the artwork for the band's first music video, from the forthcoming debut album Yours, Dreamily, due September 4. Limited prints from the video will be available for purchase. Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis.

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The Black Keys close out their summer festival tour with a headline set at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on Saturday. The band plays the last set on the Lands End stage that night.

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Tyondai Braxton shares a double bill with the band Deerhoof at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, tonight. Braxton, who made his Nonesuch Records debut with the release of his album HIVE1 earlier this year, performs next at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles on Thursday.

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Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy’s new chamber opera, The Last Hotel, a collaboration with playwright Edna Walsh, about life, death, duty and guilt, receives its world premiere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Saturday night as part of Edinburgh International Festival. The Crash Ensemble, led by conductor André de Ridder, performs the piece with a cast that includes baritone Robin Adams, sopranos Claudia Boyle and Katherine Manley, and Irish actor Mikel Murfi. Performances at the festival continue Monday through Wednesday.

The Edinburgh International Festival kicked off last night with a free outdoor event called The Harmonium Project, which combined John Adams’s choral work Harmonium with a series of animations projected onto the outside of the Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Working with the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Design Informatics, the project examines the effects singing has on both the performer and the listener.

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Rhiannon Giddens continues her tour with a stop at Mountain Stage at the Myles Center for the Arts in Elkins, West Virginia, on Saturday, as part of the weekend-long Augusta Heritage Festival. You can watch it all as it happens, as the show will be streaming live on mountainstage.org starting at 7:30 PM EST.

Giddens’ performance at last weekend’s Cambridge Folk Festival in the UK is due to air on Sky Arts TV on Saturday as part of a festival highlights special that also includes label mates Punch Brothers and Olivia Chaney. The Guardian gave glowing reviews to all three performers, saying "Giddens was a revelation," "Chaney showed how it should be sung," and Punch Brothers were "magnificent."

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James Farm, the quartet of Joshua Redman, Aaron Parks, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland, performs at Richmond Jazz Fest in Richmond, Virginia, on Sunday. "The quartet grooves fiercely," says the Boston Globe in its review of the band’s latest album, last year’s City Folk. The Financial Times describes it as "ten beautifully crafted miniatures that rock with rhythm." James Farm has a full tour of Europe slated for November.

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, whose Record Store Day EP More Roar was released digitally today, make festival appearances this weekend at Fête du Bruit in Landerneau, France, on Saturday and Lokerse Festival in Lokeren, Belgium, on Sunday. According to the folks at the Lokerse Festival, "To those of you who have never seen him perform live before we say: Plant doesn’t leave his house unless he’s bringing pure magic."