Chris Thile, Solo Mandolin

Here’s how multiple Grammy-winning mandolinist Chris Thile learned that he was a 2012 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Award of $500,000.  “I started getting these calls from a 312 number, which is Chicago,” he told the Wall Street Journal, “and in this day and age, does anyone answer their phone when they don’t know the number?… I just figured it was a robot call telling me to vote. Finally they left a message: “Tell no one about this call.” I don’t watch tons of TV but I’ve seen enough to know that that’s what someone says right before you get shot!  My tour manager googled the number and it was the MacArthur Foundation…. I still kind of thought that maybe my band mates were messing with me!”  Mr. Thile transitions between genres with the greatest of ease.  A former member of the trio Nickel Creek and current member of the Bluegrass quintet Punch Brothers… collaborator with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddle player Stuart Duncan on the Grammy-winning “Goat Rodeo Sessions”… and composer of music for the post-apocalyptic film “The Hunger Games,” he will release an album of Bach Violin Sonatas and Partitas this summer. For more information on that release, click here.  He is, as the New York Times summed it up, “the instrument’s brightest star.”

This concert is funded through the American Masterpieces program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.