John Adams takes part in the Hallé's festival of his music in Manchester, UK. Timo Andres celebrates Halloween with Kronos Quartet in San Francisco, including a new piece by Gabriel Kahane, who is at 92NY in NYC, where Davóne Tines is at the Frick. Mary Halvorson and Amaryllis play About Ghosts in Finland and Berlin. Natalie Merchant kicks off a tour in Western MA and upstate NY. Robert Plant and Saving Grace are in Charlottesville. Cécile McLorin Salvant is in Boston and Philadelphia. Gustavo Santaolalla brings Ronroco to Hamburg and Oslo. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed in Baltimore. Molly Tuttle is at Suwannee Hulaween in Florida.
Composer John Adams is the subject of a three-day festival by the Hallé at The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, England, which continues with two performances today and one on Saturday, after the composer opened the festival conducting his Harmonium, Slonimsky’s Earbox, and a selection from Nixon in China last night. This afternoon, Euan Shields conducts musicians from the Hallé and RNCM for Adams’ Chamber Symphony, Hallelujah Junction, and John’s Book of Alleged Dances. Tonight’s program, performed by RNCM Symphony Orchestra and conductors Clark Rundell and Julius Mauldin, includes Adams’ My Father Knew Charles Ives, as well as works by Ives, Michael Daugherty, and Jessie Montgomery. On Saturday, Adams returns to the podium for the festival finale, conducting the Hallé in an all-Adams program of Scheherazade.2, The Chairman Dances, and the UK premiere of The Rock You Stand On. You can hear most of these works on John Adams Collected Works, a forty-disc box set released in 2022 with recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with Nonesuch Records.
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Composer/pianist Timo Andres joins Kronos Quartet at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco tonight for the Halloween program Spooky. It features the world premieres of Gabriel Kahane’s A Gorey Nocturne and Thelonius Monk/Timo Andres’s Monk Nocturnes, excerpts Crumb’s Black Angels, works by Philip Glass, Janáček, Oswald, and more.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, Gabriel Kahane performs at 92NY’s Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center in New York City tonight. The program, only light can do that, features the composer on piano, vocals, and guitar, joined by bassist Chris Morrissey, drummer Josh Dion, violinists David Bernat and Demenic Salerni, violist Lauren Spaulding, and cellist Arlen Hlusko. Kahane’s new album, Heirloom, released earlier this month, features a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra by the same name, performed by his father, the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane, and the Brooklyn-based orchestral collective The Knights.
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Guitarist Mary Halvorson and her improvisatory sextet Amaryllis—Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet)—continue their About Ghosts European tour, performing at Sokos Hotel Torni in Tampere, Finland, tonight, and Haus der Berliner Festspiele in Berlin on Saturday for Jazzfest Berlin. About Ghosts, released earlier this year, "conjures such vibrant, picturesque riffs, capricious melodic excursions, and suspenseful rhythmic undertows," DownBeat says in its four-star review, "a marvelous document for Halvorson’s compositional acumen and conceptual ingenuity.” The magazine's Critics Poll named Halvorson Guitarist of the Year and Amaryllis Group of the Year.
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Natalie Merchant, who celebrated a birthday this week, kicks off her acoustic three-week tour, joined by her guitarist of twenty-five years, Erik Della Penna, with sold-out shows at Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, tonight, and Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York on Sunday. Her latest record, Keep Your Courage, released on Nonesuch Records in 2023, dives into love and human connection in its many forms, with Mojo calling it “her most beautiful [material] in decades.”
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Robert Plant and Saving Grace—vocalist Suzi Dian, drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, and cellist Barney Morse-Brown—kicked off their first ever North American tour in support of their new album, Saving Grace, last night in Wheeling, West Virginia, and continue this weekend with a sold-out show at Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Sunday. “Saving Grace, Plant’s new album, finds him continuing his journey, as curious and enthusiastic about his discoveries as ever,” says PopMatters. “If you were to stumble into a pub somewhere in Wales late on a rainy evening, Saving Grace (the album and the band) is precisely what you’d want to hear.”
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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole—perform at Berklee Performance Center in Boston on Saturday, and the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts’ Zellerbach Theatre in Philadelphia on Sunday. Her new album, Oh Snap, was released last month. Salvant sat down for a Nonesuch Q&A about the new album, covering a wide range of topics, including her songwriting process, working on the project in secret, AutoTune, bodily fluids, frogs, and embracing weirdness. You can see what she had to say in the six-part series here.
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Composer/producer/musician Gustavo Santaolalla continues his European tour of his acclaimed 1998 album Ronroco at Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg tonight, and Sentrum Scene in Oslo on Sunday. A remastered edition of the Grammy and Academy Award winner’s critically acclaimed album was released on vinyl for the first time in a newly remastered edition on Nonesuch Records last year.
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Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed by The Emmanuel Choir at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore on Sunday. The piece, with a libretto by Nathaniel Bellows, is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Its first recording, featuring the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch, was released on New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records in 2020. You can listen to her talk about it on Resounding Verse here and watch videos for each movement of the piece here.
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Bass-baritone Davóne Tines joins the renaissance ensemble Sonnambula for a sold-out performance of A Black Masque at The Frick Collection’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium in New York City on Sunday.
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Molly Tuttle brings music from her new album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, and more to The Meadow at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida, on Sunday for Suwannnee Hulaween. "Molly Tuttle is one of the best young guitarists in the business,” says NPR’s Stephen Thompson, including So Long Little Miss Sunshine on the All Songs Considered Best New Albums episode. “This thing is magical. It is so good.” You can watch the new music video for her cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It” here.
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