Birds of a New Musical Feather

‘All-Star’ Contemporary String Quartet Owls Lands at Hahn Hall in West Coast Debut

Owls perform at Hahn Hall on April 11. | Photo: Courtesy

Inarguably, one of the contemporary highlights of the current classical season lands at Hahn Hall on Friday, April 11, with the sighting/sounding of Owls. Hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures, this venturesome self-described “inverted” quartet outta Brooklyn will be making its local debut, also its West Coast debut. Adding to the “newness” factor, the group — with violin, viola and two (count ’em) cellos — released its debut album, Rare Birds, just last month.

Debuts aside, we’ve had six degrees of connection to its four gifted musicians in the 805. Cellist/composer Paul Wiancko performed in his new role in the Kronos Quartet at Campbell Hall last spring. Soon after, dynamic young violinist Alexi Kenney gave a tour de force solo performance in the dramatic Shifting Ground program, ranging from Bach to Saariaho and Mario Davidowsky and beyond, at the Ojai Music Festival last year, a festival highlight.

Just last month, we heard the “other” Owls cellist, Gabriel Cabezas, with his group yMusic at Hahn Hall (part of the Music Academy of the West’s Mariposa series), the centerpiece of which was a stunning new work by composer Gabriella Smith. Completing the six-degrees Venn diagram, Cabezas also performed Smith’s cello concerto Lost Coast at the Granada with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2022.

Which brings us to Owls, while demonstrating the variety of the musicians’ alliances on the new music scene. What began as a casual one-off gig in New York City in 2019 eventually developed into a fascinating and highly personal “side project” for musicians committed to busy schedules and dedicated ensembles elsewhere in their lives. As compared to classical groups more formally engaged in commissioning new work and tending the fires of existing repertoire, this foursome gathered in the Brooklyn apartment of Wiancko and violist Ayane Kozasa (the fourth Owl), where they listened to favorite music and cooked up spontaneous arrangements.

Given the intuitive and impromptu nature of the quartet’s formation, the group noted in a statement, “The lack of prewritten music for our ‘inverted quartet’ configuration turned out to be liberating.”

Owls’ freshness of approach can be amply appreciated on Rare Birds (listen here). The six-track recording opens with Wiancko’s expansive rethink on the Ben E. King R&B hit “Stand by Me,” transformed into an idiom-crossing mini-epic built up from the signature first three notes of the song. Music of proto-minimalist Terry Riley, Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh — Reqs, written for the Kronos’s 50th anniversary and receiving its first recording here — and the harmonically tougher stuff of Wiancko’s cello-phonic Vox Petra.

But the album also includes a Baroque “greatest hit,” Francois Couperin’s infectious and familiar re-arranged keyboard work Les Barricades mystérieuses and the gently Norwegian folk-ish Ricercar, which might serve as friendly-neutral NPR interlude music. In all, the album aims to please listeners from both sides of the serious new music aficionado/general music lover aisle.

At the outset and along the path of their story thus far, they report, “All four of us instinctively let each other feel and be exactly who we were, with an unspoken ease of communication, trust, and a joyful, raucous abandon in our music-making.

“Our guiding principle was simple: All four of us must completely love everything we play. And so began the experiment that is Owls, with the understanding that if our principles ever felt compromised or if our feelings ever dissolved, so would the group.

“What happens when four people prioritize their love of discovering and making music together over all else? For starters, this album. This is the very music that inspired us to give our weird little side-project a name.”

In fact, the Owls sound is not so weird and, potentially, the project is not so little. Owls makes a joyous and inviting sound, a ripe and ready new variation on the string quartet theme well worth seeking out.

See Owls in their West Coast debut on Friday, April 11, at 7 p.m. at Hahn Hall (1070 Fairway Rd.). For tickets and more information, see bit.ly/42aKAOt.