Hodgson Hall, UGA Performing Arts center
Athens, Georgia – USA
October 9, 2025
Chris Thile, mandolin and vocals.
Chris Moser | 17 OCT 2025
One man, one mandolin, on an otherwise bare stage for 90-plus minutes. Really? Yes, really, and patrons who filled UGA’s Hodgson Hall Friday evening, October 11 loved every minute of it.
No doubt many of the patrons were more accustomed to seeing Chris Thile front one of his three renowned string bands, Punch Brothers, Nickel Creek and Mutual Admiration Society. Some likely were familiar with his collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Fiona Apple, Brad Mehldau or other music legends. But in his current tour Thile is soloing with a wide-ranging program integrating original songs, traditional folk tunes and sonatas and partitas by J.S. Bach – all delivered with mesmerizing musical virtuosity and leavened with Thile’s humble, folksy, mischievous stage presence.
Chris Thile is a Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, composer, and MacArthur Fellow recipient of the prestigious “Genius Grant.” The Guardian calls him “that rare being: an all-round musician.” He is sometimes categorized as a classical and New Age performer, but he’s much more than that. NPR hails him as a “genre-defying musical genius.” His jazzy, fiery, improvisational mandolin style produces what the New York Times calls “one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vocal harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty.”
In 2016 Thile replaced retiring Garrison Kiellor as host of the public radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion (later retitled Live from Here with Chris Thile). He carried on in that role for four years until the show fell victim to the COVID pandemic.
Thile combines intricate, often lightning-fast mandolin picking, trilling and strumming with sweet, soaring high-tenor vocals. He puts his tall, lanky frame to good use with rocking and animated footwork, and his boyish face radiates sheer joy. He had the audience won over from the start when he segued from an original song called “I Made This for You” to Bach’s Partita No.1 in E Major for Solo Violin.
His program richly invoked October and the Halloween season. His original songs included “Calvin and the Ghosties” (written for his son, Calvin) and “Two Ghost Stories”—one based on a story he heard from his wife Claire and one from his grandmother, whom he described as a “metaphysical therapist” who “talked with the dead.”
Toward the middle of show, Thile called for the audience to request traditional fiddle tunes. From their requests he easily improvised a medley of “Ookpik Waltz,” “Brown County Breakdown,” and “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom.” In another high point, he started a medley with a 15th century English children’s song “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night.” After singing several verses, he then went into a jazzy original tune, then a Bach sonata and a New Age-style interlude before returning to the original tune and story. It brought the house down. He ended the main program with Bach’s Sonata in C Major for Solo Violin before returning to encore with a haunting story song, “The Lighthouse’s Tale.”
For the last two years Thile has been touring with Nickel Creek to promote the critically acclaimed 2023 release Celebrants. Most recently he has been delighting audiences with a playfully ambitious biographical composition called ATTENTION! (a “narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra”). He has also been engaged in the production of a new musical variety show, The Energy Curfew Music Hour.
But this intimate performance showed how he can spellbind an audience with just himself and his mandolin for a thoroughly delightful evening. At one point he quoted Bach’s sentiment that one of music’s aims is “the refreshment of the soul.” A throng left Hodgson Hall that night with souls nicely refreshed. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Chris Thile: christhile.com
- UGA Performing Arts Center: pac.uga.edu
Read more by Chris Moser.
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