NPR Music

This past week Barbra Streisand, born and raised in Brooklyn, played the borough for the first time since she was eight years old. Back then it was on somebody's stoop on Pulaski Street in Bed-Stuy. Now 70 — after winning all the awards (Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Oscar, etc.) — she was only the second performer at a new venue in her hometown, a 19,000 seat basketball and entertainment arena called the Barclays Center.

Everywhere you look right now, it seems like American symphony orchestras are fighting for their lives — strikes, lockouts, bankruptcy. Perhaps the biggest example is the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra, which is just coming out of its own bankruptcy. Tonight, its new 37-year-old music director takes the podium as the venerable orchestra begins a reboot.

Travel to northern places in Europe and North America to hear the sound of unspoiled landscapes and rocky shorelines bathed in northern light.

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Ahmed Janka Nabay was one of the first musicians to take 500-year-old bubu music outside of his homeland of Sierra Leone, where he'd been a rock star. Nabay was forced to flee the country in the midst of that country's civil war, and eventually wound up in Philadelphia in 2003. Nine years later, Nabay's band has released its first album, En Yay Sah, which blends bubu and electronic dance music.