Chris Thile revisits Bach on tour and in a new recording

When Chris Thile embarks on a project that involves music he didn’t write, he starts by asking himself some questions. These include: “What am I bringing to the table?” And, “Why do I think I have the right to do this?”

And then the mandolin virtuoso, who has been called “the god of small sounds” by the New York Times, gets granular. He studies the material at a circuitry level — memorizing it, absorbing its patterns of tension and release, seeking ways to shape and shade the lines. Notes on the mandolin don’t “ring” the way notes on a violin or piano do; the rapid decay forces him to be precise about each attack and every aspect of the rhythm. That can require planning.

“I’m going to take it apart and pretend I did write it,” Thile says, describing his preparation phase. “I get in there like a freaking little kid with a clock radio, taking it apart and figuring out how it works. It’s just brutal sometimes.”

Thile’s wide-ranging discography contains the fruits of this offstage labor — it’s evident on the albums he’s made with Nickel Creek as well as the agile post-modern string band Punch Brothers. It has informed his sparkling collaborations with Edgar Meyer, Yo-Yo Ma and Brad Mehldau. It runs throughout his collections of original thematically linked songs with words, like his 2021 solo album, Laysongs.

The challenges inherent in Thile’s interpretive art are slightly different, however, when he is playing Bach solo. The electrifying new Bach: Sonatas & Partitas Vol. 2 [album release due Nov. 7, Symphony Center Presents performance on Oct. 24] shows that in the years since Nonesuch released the first volume, in 2013, Thile has grown exponentially as an artist. He’s even more fluid on the instrument (hard as that is to believe!), particularly on the breakneck, chase-scene tempos that are a specialty. He’s further refined his easygoing phrasing, his innate gift for framing Bach’s run-on narratives in crisp paragraphs. His lines seem to become almost instantly airborne, propelled by a sweet, singing quality.

And, along with all of that, Thile’s renditions of the remaining three sonatas and partitas that Bach wrote for violin — which he recorded in four different locations, including Tompkins Square Park in the center of Manhattan’s bustling East Village — present Thile as a fierce original thinker. Balancing skill and spirit, he transforms Bach’s enduring structural logic into an uplifting, disarmingly emotional, present-tense experience.

The electrifying new Bach: Sonatas & Partitas Vol. 2 shows that in the years since Nonesuch released the first volume, in 2013, Thile has grown exponentially as an artist.

When Thile recorded the first three of Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, he didn’t worry too much about what kind of contribution he might be making to the canon — simply the act of playing the technically comprehensive works on mandolin was contribution enough.

So when the mandolinist and MacArthur Fellow set out to record the remaining pieces, he approached pre-production the same way he did before. He documented practice sessions using the voice memo function on his phone and listened back. “Because a thing I know about myself is that my inner ear can be louder than my actual playing,” Thile says. “I can be hearing something that’s not there.”

He recalls listening to the C Major Fugue. “Really listening and turning off my wishful inner ear. It sounded so plodding to me. Ugh. I was despondent, I didn’t know what to do.”

Thile describes what he heard as a sudden jolt. “I had to come to terms with the fact that approaching this music with the kind of reverence borderlining on fear that I have for Bach, was not actually bringing me joy. Whereas it did for volume 1. It really did.”

The diagnosis might have been accurate, but the remedy was not instant. Thile found himself confronting big questions about the orthodoxy of Bach performance — which has been accruing for centuries, arguably growing more rigid and stifling over time — while trying to reconcile those with parallel questions about how much of his personality to impart, how to make this reading of Bach his own.

“This time around, it sounded false,” Thile says of his preliminary interpretations. “It’s just not where I am as a musician anymore.”

Having the long stern shadow of Bach peering over his shoulder didn’t help. “When you’re interacting with arguably the greatest music ever written, you can get in your head a little bit.” 

“What I realized during the course of making the second round of Sonatas and Partitas,” Thile continues, “is that there’s no point in me playing other people’s music if I don’t have the confidence to get in there and take the clock radio apart and put it back together the way I’m hearing it deep down.”

“I had to come to terms with the fact that approaching this music with the kind of reverence borderlining on fear that I have for Bach, was not actually bringing me joy. . . ”

In his liner notes, Thile explains that he considers Bach an abiding presence in all of his musical endeavors, and likens the study of Bach to yoga, a lifelong practice never to be perfected. When he heard himself playing Bach in ways that didn’t resonate, he began reeling through times in his life when he’d caught a vibe someplace while wrestling with a Bach work. When he tapped into the eternal nature of Bach.

“I’m playing this s---everywhere. I’m playing it at Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and I’m playing it in a freaking Hampton Inn hotel stairwell,” Thile says, rattling off memories of practice sessions and performances. “As I’m going through my inner ear’s version of this thing, it’s like I’m hearing it in all these various places that I practice Bach. My mind starts stitching it together and, of course, I like that sound. Because that’s my experience of Bach.”

This realization was all the catalyst he needed to reorient his approach. Rather than aiming for an illusory ideal of Bach perfection, Thile took the master’s intricate melodies out of the cloister for some air. One session took place at Farrell Concert Hall of Murray State University, which is where he first performed Bach. Another was Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee, where he got married. 

Rather than aiming for an illusory ideal of Bach perfection, Thile took the master’s intricate melodies out of the cloister for some air.

Thile and engineer Dave Sinko spent seven hours recording in Tompkins Square Park — home to two playgrounds, a dog run, sun bathers, skateboarders and a constant flow of New Yorkers from all backgrounds enjoying some shared fresh air. One of his favorite moments, preserved on the final cut, comes at the end of the C Major Sonata when a lone listener claps. The most conventional setting was Reservoir Studios in New York, which provided a sonic home base as Thile edited passages recorded at different locations into a unified, mosaic-like performance.

Committing to this distinctive production process sparked other changes: “It emboldened me to get the highlighter pen out, ornament freely, add little rhythmic grace notes if I felt them, write in the margins of the text, you know? Just remembering that every second of music presents a choice that I have to believe in. Then it sounds like me playing Bach. That was the dam breaking: I couldn’t unhear the idea of recording in multiple environments, then it was like, ‘Well if I let myself do that, what wouldn’t I let myself do?’”

His answer is everywhere in the animated leaps and off-axis gestures that set this Bach apart from conventional readings. The album opens in an eerie extended crescendo, with Thile using an unusual feathering tremolo effect to underscore the harmonic progression of the D minor Allamanda. He put a microphone on the floor to capture his foot keeping time in the Ciaccona and bathed the E Major Loure in an ethereal halo of reverb and delay. He lingers over some phrases as though stretching them apart, then bounds through others at a playground scamper.

Sometimes Thile follows the ornamentation indicated in the score; other times he adds his own idiosyncratic ideas: “One of the things that I had to keep telling myself is that I’m covering this music, the way I cover Bill Monroe or Radiohead.” Thile recalls. “I didn’t write it. So there has to be some other reason I’m presenting it. I have to be in a sincere two-way conversation with it.”

That said, he adds a rogue’s disclaimer: “For all of the various liberties that I take, you never don’t get what Bach wrote. I’ll add to it occasionally, like on the D minor Sarabanda, I go way off the rails on the repeat of the first half and the first time through the second half, but it’s important to me that you hear every note that Bach wrote.”

Whether Bach purists like what Thile does when he tilts his small, pinpoint-precise sounds in directions that could be considered irreverent is of no concern to him. “What I learned doing this is that sincerity is essential,” Thile says. “But not immovable. As someone who practices Bach the way that people practice yoga, you’re never done. This is just a snapshot of where I was at forty-three and forty-four playing this eternal music.”