Last week, Chris Thile joined Edgar Meyer—with whom he has recorded the duo's debut album due out on Nonesuch next month—for the bassist's annual Aspen Music Festival recital. It's a concert that Aspen Times reviewer Harvey Steiman says "is always among the most highly anticipated events of the year." The writer describes Meyer's virtuosic playing as the sort that leads his fellow bass players to "just blink in wonder" and Thile as "a mandolin player with similarly amazing chops."

Steiman counts the "sheer virtuosity" of Meyer's music as one of the qualifying factors for its inclusion in the generally classically oriented Aspen Festival. In a similar vein, he writes of Chris's solo on one of several songs the pair performed from their forthcoming album that it "stretched the boundaries of what a mandolin can do."

The concert as a whole, and another song off the upcoming release in particular, offered further evidence of the duo's skills. Writes Steiman:

There were several incandescent moments over the course of the concert’s two hours and 10 minutes when the two musicians’ technical skill and musical inventiveness combined to produce something unique. The last piece on the program, for example, “Fence Post in the Front Yard,” contains some sequences of notes, played in octaves, that fly by so fast the musicians’ hands were a blur. And yet, the music was so perfectly articulated that it sounded like a single instrument.

To read the full concert review, visit aspentimes.com. For more information on the album Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile, click here.