Kronos Quartet is at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium tonight for Oasis: Music of Central Asia and the Middle East, a concert exploring the popular, contemporary, and mystical musical traditions of Central Asia and the Middle East. Featured on the program are Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's titular piece, Oasis; Escalay (Water Wheel) by the late Nubian composer and oud master Hamza El Din; selections from The Cave, Steve Reich's collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot on the Arab-Israeli conflict; and the West Coast premiere of Israeli-American producer Raz Mesinai's Crossfader. Joining the Quartet are special guests Afghan rubab (lute) virtuoso Homayoun Sakhi, Salar Nader on tabla, and Abbos Kosimov on the doyra, a central Asian frame drum.

Previewing the event for the San Jose Mercury News, music writer Andrew Gilbert says tonight's concert fits perfectly with the group's career-long efforts: "For more than three decades, the new-music pioneers have scoured the globe stalking composers and collecting sounds in an unrelenting quest to open new territory for string quartet exploration."

---

John Adams's 1996 piece Slonimsky's Earbox will be performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra led by Donald Runnicles at The Music Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, tonight. Also on the program, which the orchestra performed last night in Glasgow, are Ravel's Concerto for Piano Left Hand and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. The concert will be recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

On Sunday night, The Graz Opera Ballet unveils Schwanentrilogie, a new work by choreographer Darrel Toulon set to music by Adams, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky, at the Marius Burkert Opera House in Graz, Austria. The Adams works in the piece are The Dharma at Big Sur, Gnarly Buttons, Road Movies, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and Tromba Lontana. Performances run through April 5.

---

The Afro-Cuban All Stars have begun a North American tour that has brought them to the West Coast this weekend. They'll play the Shedd Institute in Eugene, Oregon, tonight, then head down to California, where they'll play the first of several dates in the state at the Arcata Theater in the northern town of Arcata on Sunday.

---

The Gipsy Kings conclude their winter US tour with stops at Boston's House of Blues tonight and the Chicago Theatre on Saturday. The group will return for a couple of dates in June and again in September.

---

Philip Glass brings his piece Book of Longing, based on the poetry and images of Leonard Cohen, to Bass Concert Hall in Austin, Texas, with the composer at the keyboard. Cohen’s recorded voice, paintings, and drawings are prominently incorporated into the multimedia event.

---

Richard Goode performs two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra at London's Barbican Hall beginning this Sunday. Sir Colin Davis conducts the orchestra in a program that pairs Mozart's Piano Concert No. 18, K. 456, with Berlioz's Te Deum. The performers give an encore performance of the program in the Hall on Monday night.

---

Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patti Griffin, and Buddy Miller bring their Three Girls and Their Buddy tour to a close this weekend with performances at New York's Beacon Theatre tonight; the Broadway Theater in Kingston, New York, Saturday; and, finally, The Orpheum in Boston on Monday. The Village Voice predicts "a good time will be had by all" with "this fantastic foursome" on stage.

---

Stephen Sondheim joins New York Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich for a rare one-on-one conversation titled A Life in the Theater at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia Saturday night. And as Playbill reported yesterday, Nonesuch joins PS Classics to begin recording the Public Theatre's recent production of Sondheim's latest work, Road Show, on Monday. The work is a re-imagining of the composer's earlier work from 2004, Bounce.