November 5, 2025 | By Hannah Edgar, Musical America
CHICAGO—Just as cellist Paul Wiancko sat down to play at Guarneri Hall, he locked eyes with an audience member in the front row, proudly wearing a Kronos T-shirt. “Mike, man,” he sighed, in mock exasperation, “wrong band.” Many by now know Wiancko and violist Ayane Kozasa through that “other” quartet, whose legacy as an approachable omnivore of the American chamber music world remains uncontested, half a century after its founding. But Owls—which inverts the usual string quartet with two cellos (Wiancko and Gabriel Cabezas) and one violin (Alexi Kenney)—is poised to be just as magnetic a force.
These busy birds nest together just once in a while. Whether as soloists or chamber players, Wiancko, Cabezas, Kenney, and Kozasa all have such full careers that Owls rehearsals are rare and concerts even rarer. Judging by their extraordinary Guarneri Hall concert on Oct. 29, however, absence makes their hearts grow fonder. Owls played a premiere by Gabriella Smith—the group’s very first commission, supported by presenter Nova Linea Musica—and selections from their debut album last March with an almost telepathic comfort, as though hosting a family gathering rather than a reunion of far-flung colleagues.
Perhaps the time away is what gave this concert its freshness. At one point in Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s ecstatic and athletic R?qs—inspired by folk dances from the composer’s native Azerbaijan—Kenney scampishly urged the tempo ahead, like a premier danseur daring his corps to get toe-tied. They did not, trotting right along with the ghost of a smirk across their faces.
Owls also demonstrated an attention to intonation uncommon even among full-time quartets. The cozy Guarneri Hall space doesn’t have much resonance to speak of; even so, their chords often hung in the air, cathedral-like, several seconds after bows had left strings.
If this group’s musicianship is a revelation, so is its repertoire. Because of the unusual instrumentation, Owls collaboratively arranges much of its music. R?qs, for example, was originally composed for Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary, then reworked for a two-cello configuration. As Kenney told the audience, Owls traditionally closes out performances with its arrangement of still another string quartet, Terry Riley’s jubilant Good Medicine. On this occasion, saving Riley’s opus for last had the effect of revisiting familiar stylistic ground—which is not to discredit the Owls’s enthusiastic, rousing performance.
Other works are fair game for Owls’s unique instrumentation. A treatment of Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses, originally for keyboard, peered at the French Baroque master through a thoroughly modern prism. With the melody line set in the violin’s middle-low register and played in a matte straight-tone, Kenney was sometimes overlapped by his colleague’s surging accompaniment. The arrangement ends in a gently hocketing three-way pizzicato, like muffled raindrops on a roof.
Cellos sway in a similar hand-off pizzicato effect in Ricercar, a song released by guitar–fiddle duo Trollstilt in 2000. The arrangement is somewhat in dialogue with the Baroque spirit of the Couperin, but cast in a folkish round. It more clearly delineates the violin and viola as the fiddlers, while cellos assume the strumming role of the original guitar. All the while, the Owls approached it with the easy flexibility of a two-player unit, melody and accompaniment ebbing and flowing together.
Owls has a secret weapon in Wiancko, whose compositions dote on low strings. He adapted two of them—Vox Petra, for two violas and two cellos, and When the Night, for cello quartet—for the Owls.
His quartet-mates all commissioned him early on, when he was first starting out as a composer, and it’s easy to see why. In his pieces, everything a string instrument can do is on the table: the quality of its harmonics, the way a bowed note is tapered or choked off, the thwacks of unpitched pizzicato or taps of the bow screw against the body of the instrument. Those lead to the woozy dreamscapes of Vox Petra and the shadowy lyricism of When the Night, the latter a Dutilleux-ian riff on the first three notes of the song “Stand By Me.”
Named after a genus of owl, Smith’s new Aegolius stands aside Wiancko’s works in ingenuity and immersiveness. The Seattle-based composer thought of the piece while walking home from a Steve Reich festival in Paris, which leaves its stamp on Aegolius’s on-the-move phasing: Kenney and Kozasa began in unison, but then musicians slowly peel apart, playing in different pulses for much of the piece. They link together at important junctures, in rhythmic figures that recall the cries of Aegolius owls.
Few composers after John Luther Adams have depicted the natural world with Smith’s acuity. Aegolius is an entrancing example of that; Owls’s committed account of it was a marvel of collective coordination, like a flock of birds undulating across the sky.
