SAN DIEGO — San Diego native and Nickel Creek band co-founder Chris Thile has been named the music director for the 2027 Ojai Music Festival, one of the classical music world’s most prestigious and consistently groundbreaking annual events.

Since its inception in 1947, the festival’s highly coveted music director position has been held by such legendary composers as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez and John Adams. Thile, a multiple Grammy Award-winner and 2012 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, is only the third San Diegan to be selected as Ojai’s music director. The other two are flute innovator and composer Claire Chase and percussion marvel and UC San Diego professor Steven Schick.

The 2027 festival will feature the world premiere of an Ojai-commissioned solo mandolin suite for Thile by noted composer Andrew Norman. Thile will also team with acclaimed jazz and classical singer Cécile McLorin Salvant and pianist Sullivan Fortner on a new version of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which will receive its world premiere at the 2027 Festival.

Caroline Shaw will be the composer-in-residence and will perform. Bassist and composer Edgar Meyer, one of Thile’s longtime collaborators, will make his Ojai debut. So will the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, which will be the resident ensemble at the festival’s 2027 edition. More performers and repertoire will be announced in the coming months.

“Chris is the perfect choice because he comes from many different music worlds,” Teddy Abrams, the Ojai festival’s incoming artistic and executive director, told The San Diego Union-Tribune on Thursday afternoon.

Indeed, Thile’s many collaborators over the years have ranged from cello giant Yo-Yo Ma and James Taylor to leading jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (with whom he will perform here Aug. 27 at the Balboa Theatre as part of this year’s SummerFest) and the San Diego Symphony (with which Thile made his orchestral debut in 2000 at the age of 19). He and his band, Punch Brothers, will perform Oct. 9 at UC San Diego.

“If your first thought about Chris is as a great mandolin player coming from the worlds of folk and bluegrass music, you might be very surprised to find him at Ojai,” said Abrams, who is the music director of Kentucky’s Louisville Orchestra.

“But if you look under the covers, you’ll see he’s also one of the most committed and fascinating people in classical music in general, with a special affinity for (the work of) living composers. He blends all these different genres and Ojai is the perfect place for him to undertake new musical adventures. People attending the festival will leave with a new appreciation for the mandolin.”

Thile was working in a recording studio Thursday and could not be reached for comment. But his enthusiasm was palpable in a statement released by the festival.

“For adventurous musicians and concertgoers, the Ojai festival is a kind of Atlantis; emerging annually to remind us that our wildest hopes and dreams of music that expands our world — and a world that expands our music — are not only possible, but waiting for us,” Thile said.

“I pinched myself all through the call where Teddy Abrams asked if I would consider being the music director for the 2027 edition. A mandate to share music and musicians who have challenged and changed my perception of what great music can be/do with a community of listeners who crave exactly that in a performance experience? YES, PLEASE.”

Thile is the first Ojai music director whose past credits include hosting a popular weekly NPR show, “A Prairie Home Companion” (in 2016 and 2017) and its successor, “Live From Here” (from 2017 to 2020, when it ceased airing because of the pandemic shutdown). Nickel Creek, the San Diego bluegrass trio Thile co-founded when he was 8 years old, had performed on “A Prairie Home Companion” when it was helmed by its original host, Garrison Keillor.

A musician who thrives in seemingly any setting, Thile has been featured on albums by everyone from Joshua Bell, the Dixie Chicks and Béla Fleck to Dolly Parton and the Chieftains. He has made two albums of Bach violin sonatas and partitas that he ingeniously adapted for mandolin. In 2023 at the Hollywood Bowl, Thile debuted a new work — ATTENTION! A narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra — which he had been commissioned to compose by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Chris and I have become very close friends over the past few years and he toured all over Kentucky with the Louisville Symphony and me,” said Ojai artistic and executive director Abrams.

“I love his virtuosity, command and deep love of music. I’m so enamored and impressed by him as a musician, and have wanted to work with him in a deeper way. Chris plays things on the mandolin that people never thought were possible. Ojai provides him with the resources I think he deserves.”

More information on the Ojai Music Festival is available at ojaifestival.org. This year’s 80th edition takes place June 11-14. Esa-Pekka Salonen is the music director.

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