PRINCETON - The image of Chris Thile playing Bach, alone on the Richardson Auditorium stage on Thursday, won't go away anytime soon. Here was a lanky, slightly crooked, fashionably rumpled 32-year-old guy with all his physicality funneled into a relatively small mandolin, negotiating the considerable intricacies of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin .
A tour de force, obviously. But Thile also brought an element of loneliness to Bach seldom heard behind all the music's compositional exuberance. Sometimes if you peer deeply into Bach, you'll find pretty much everything. And Thile was indeed peering.
Looking around at the grandeur of the auditorium, he said, "I always wanted to play Bach in a castle," and later suggested that for future tours, he'd stay there and import audiences to Princeton.