Triple threat Chris Thile thrives on what he calls ‘a fugue of musical activity’

Chris Thile is a restless, modern-day musical chameleon. 

Best known for putting an innovative and very personal stamp on the worlds of bluegrass, folk and roots music, the mandolinist, singer and composer also ventures regularly into the classical-music realm. The 2012 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner tours with the popular groups Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers, performs with symphony orchestras and presents solo concerts.

“It’s a challenge, but it’s also a necessary one,” he said of his multifaceted, non-stop activities. “I really love it. I feel that all the stuff that I’m into benefits from all the other stuff I’m into. There is a lot going on, but I thrive on that kind of fugue of musical activity.”

Symphony Center audiences will have the opportunity to hear Thile twice in the 2025-26 season in very different contexts. “What a dream that is,” he said. He will appear solo in “An Evening with Chris Thile,” a Symphony Center Featured Concert on Oct. 24. Then he will return for his debut concert June 8 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in his new work, ATTENTION! A narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra.

Thile, 44, describes the latter as a “crazy” combination of mandolin concerto and song cycle, in which he serves as narrator, as well as vocal and instrumental soloist. He debuted it in 2023 with the Knights, a New York-based chamber orchestra, at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, and has performed it with some 20 other ensembles since.

In the piece, he tells the story of his meeting “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher in a rooftop bar in San Diego when he was 24. “It’s my big story I tell when it gets to be that time of the evening when we’re all breaking out whatever the craziest thing that ever happened to us was,” he said. “That is mine, and I decided to musicalize it and with orchestra no less.”

Thile’s first contact with the CSO came around 2000-01 when famed bassist Edgar Meyer played him the ensemble’s 1956 recording of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra with then-Music Director Fritz Reiner. “It completely blew my world open — musically but also aesthetically,” Thile said. “Just hearing that many musicians pull together in such a profound way to deliver something that beautiful just changed my whole world and self-concept: ‘Oh, I’m the kind of person who loves the symphony orchestra.’ ”

A native of Oceanside, California, Thile began playing mandolin when he was 5 and won a mandolin championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, seven years later. The aspiring star released his first solo album, “Leading Off,” in 1994 when he was just 13. He later spent about a year and a half at Murray State University in Kentucky, but dropped out because of the time demands of his increasingly successful performing career.   

He performs regularly with Nickel Creek, a bluegrass trio featuring the siblings Sara Watkins, fiddle, and Sean Watkins, guitar. The trio’s breakout 2000 album, which was produced by roots-music superstar Alison Krauss, achieved platinum status with 1 million units sold. The threesome produced its most recent album in 2022 and toured extensively to support that release.

Thile’s other group, the Punch Brothers, is a Grammy Award-winning quintet that produces what music critic Stephen Holden in the New York Times called “American country-classical chamber music.” The group has a new podcast in which it presents live recorded episodes of a variety show called “The Energy Curfew Music Hour.” (In 2016-20, Thile served as the host of the radio show “Live from Here,” a follow-up to “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor.)  

And if all that wasn’t enough in Thile’s mainstay bluegrass-folk realm, he recorded the voice of Wendell for an updated presentation of the “Country Bear Musical Jamboree,” a show featuring a group of singing “audio-animatronic” hillbilly bears that opened in July 2024 at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Thile as Wendell sings what Disney calls a “countryfied” version of “A Whole New World” from the animated movie “Aladdin” (1992), with singer-songwriter Allison Russell in the role of Teddi Barra. “I’m an absolute, raving Disney fan,” Thile said. “They found that out and asked me if I would do that [the voiceover] and that was about the quickest ‘yes’ you could possibly imagine.”

Springing in part from his initial encounter of the CSO on record, Thile has developed increasing connections to the classical world. He debuted his groundbreaking Mandolin Concerto, Ad astra per alas porci, in 2009, and recorded three of six J.S. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin four years later on the Nonesuch label.

“Once again, the protean malleability of J.S. Bach’s genius is demonstrated by the unusual transcription of his work — in this case, the Violin Sonatas and Partitas — to another instrument, the mandolin,” wrote critic Andy Gill in the British online newspaper the Independent.

Thile’s solo concert on Oct. 24 will be part of a tour that he is informally calling Bachtober, because it will feature the three other Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin not featured on his 2013 recording. Later this year, Thile is set to release the second volume of his Bach project with those works, and he plans to have vinyl LP versions of the album available to purchase for attendees at Symphony Center. “It was a a long time coming,” he said of this complementary half of the project. “I thought I might do it almost right away. I had a great time doing the first round.”

“I love the idea that we don’t have to put our serious ears on when we listen to Bach. We can listen to that and listen to other things and see what we all think about it in each other’s company.” — Chris Thile

But the further he got away from that first set of sonatas and partitas, the more he realized he wasn’t ready to do the second volume. Some of it was scheduling, but he also discovered that he no longer liked the way he was playing those works.

“I’m still proud of Vol. 1, but I hear a little bit of fear,” he said. “I hear: ‘What would Bach think of this? What would [famed Bach pianist] Glenn Gould think of this? What would my mentor, Edgar Meyer, think of this?’ As opposed to: This is me playing this music, because I love it and because I think it is some of the greatest music ever written and because I want to have a personal relationship with it.”

So when he was well into the rehearsal process for Vol. 2, he decided to change dramatically his approach to this music. “I had to flush all that down the drain and ask every step of the way: ‘Do I like how this sounds? Do I like how it feels?’ And it resulted in a very different recording than the first time,” he said.

In addition to his modified interpretations, he recorded the album in a highly unconventional way, spreading the sessions across four locales, all of which hold some personal significance. They include a concert hall at Murray State, a gazebo in east Tennessee, where he got married (His close friend Rob Moose played two movements of Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C Major during the ceremony), and Tompkins Square Park in New York’s East Village, where he likes to rehearse largely unrecognized.

Recording parts of the project outdoors inevitably meant that there are ambient noises on the album: a gurgling creek and chirping birds at the gazebo and sirens blaring, dogs barking and kids playing in the park. “I realized that was a joy that I had never heard on record before: Bach in his infinite contrapuntal greatness with the actual counterpoint of human beings living in close proximity with one another,” he said of the latter location. “I’m really happy with the result.”

In addition to the three Bach works, he plans to play some other pieces as well, including some of his own music, during his Oct. 24 appearance. “I’ll do my best to create a little whimsical environment into which we can escape into the music,” he said. “I love the idea that we don’t have to put our serious ears on when we listen to Bach. We can listen to that and listen to other things and see what we all think about it in each other’s company.”

Part of the reason that great music stands the test of time, Thile said, is that it speaks to all facets of us as humans — “our silliness as well as our high-minded aspirations” — and he believes Bach’s works certainly fit that bill. “He speaks to our passion, our humor and our insecurities and everything,” Thile said. “I’m doing my best to bring all of that out.”