REVIEW: Chris Thile Draws Intimacy and Joy from Bach at 92NY
Above, Chris Thile at 92NY. Photo by Joseph Sinnott.
October 19, 2025
“Bach helps,” declared virtuoso mandolinist Chris Thile early in his solo concert at 92NY on Sunday evening. Promoting his second volume of Bach Sonatas and Partitas on Nonesuch Records, Grammy-winning Thile bounced onto the stage with his 2017 song “I Made This for You,” his flexible singing voice attacking the lyrics with incisive rhythm, frequently flipping into a soaring falsetto, while his fingers spun complex harmonies on the diminutive string instrument.
Thile segued directly into the Preludio from Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E major, then greeted the audience with a warm “group hug!” welcome before continuing the suite. He played the contemplative Loure with great delicacy, the earthy Gavotte and Rondeau with a rustic swagger. Thile leans into the strumming quality of the Baroque music’s sixteenth-note figurations, and brought a folksy, improvisatory air to trills and ornaments.
Adjusting the solo violin works’ tonalities — transposed to keys more suitable for mandolin — Thile fully digs into the versatility and suitability of Bach’s music to any instrument at hand. Thile’s mandolin playing in the Bach was intimate and unforced, requiring the audience to lean forward and listen mindfully.
Thile is also a one-man band, creating percussive effects and shimmering tremolos with the mandolin, even stamping his heel for a low drum sound — especially effective in the monumental Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor.
Chris Thile at 92NY. Photo by Joseph Sinnott.
Thile’s deeply personal, idiosyncratic set alternated songs from his own oeuvre with extended passages of Bach. His own compositions are sculpted from a shifting landscape of lyrical, progressive bluegrass, like the wistful, rhapsodic “Calvin and the Ghosties,” which invoked and yearned for innocent wonder, and showcased Thile’s childlike immediacy.
“Julep,” from his current band the Punch Brothers’ album The Phosphorescent Blues, inspired an impressive portion of the rapt audience to sing along. Thile took requests from the crowd, assembling an ad hoc medley of fiddle tunes (“Camptown Races” was a winning pick on this occasion), which he fashioned into a veritable fantasia on American music.
Thile’s nearly two-hour performance focused on the redemptive power of art, building to a quiet climax with the Largo from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in C Major. He reflected on love and loss (the Largo accompanied his wife down the aisle) and played with tender affection (ever so softly, without amplification), pausing for a moment of silence before the sonata’s celebratory Allegro Assai finale.
Audience participation also fueled Thile’s encore, as he fielded a barrage of requests, arriving at, of all things, “Weird Fishes” from Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Charmingly squinting at the lyrics on a borrowed smartphone, Thile recreated the complex tune on his mandolin from memory, as if by magic. But the evening was not about the musician’s prodigious genius. Communing with Bach’s eternal truths supplied invaluable moments of reflection and meditation. Therapy, even — yes, Bach helps.
