GRAMMY Award-Winning Mandolin Virtuoso Performs at Pepperdine

The Lisa Smith Wengler Center for the Arts presents:

Chris Thile

Wednesday, October 20, 2021, 8 p.m.
Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University
24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, CA

MacArthur Fellow and GRAMMY Award-winning mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile comes to Pepperdine University's Smothers Theatre in Malibu on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 8 p.m.

Tickets, priced starting at $37.50 for adults and $10 for full-time Pepperdine students, are available now by calling (310) 506-4522 or visiting the event page. More information about Chris Thile is available at christhile.com.

Mandolinist, singer, songwriter Chris Thile is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favorite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion). With his broad outlook, Thile creates a distinctly American canon and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike, giving the listener “one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vertical harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty” (New York Times).

Most recently, Thile recorded Laysongs, out June 4, 2021 on Nonesuch. The album is his first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, Laysongs’ centerpiece is the three-part “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which was inspired by C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens’ "Won’t You Come and Sing for Me," and "Ecclesiastes 2:24," original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.

THE DETAILS:

WHAT: Chris Thile
WHEN: Wednesday, October 20, 2021, 8 p.m.
WHERE: Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, CA
TICKETS: (310) 506-4522 or ticketing page
PRICES: $37.50–$75 for adults, $10 for Pepperdine students

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