Quince Ensemble and Varo String Quartet
March 28, 2026 at 3:00PM
The CheckOut
4116 N Clark Street
Chicago, IL
PROGRAM
Quince Ensemble:
Bone Needles (2006) by Gilda Lyons
Evening Morning Day (2007) by David Lang
un(bee)mo (2008) by David Dies
The Smallest Gap (2018) by Carrie Henneman Shaw
Stinging, Ringing Bells (2014) by Juhi Bansal
VARO String Quartet:
Another Living Soul (2016) by Nicole Lizée
Three Places for String Quartet (2022) by Kari Watson
gardensongs (2024) by Paul Novak
Combined Ensembles
from nothing (2012) by Ravi Kittappa
ABOUT
Varo String Quartet:
“Destined to impress even the most attuned music lovers” (Chicago Magazine), Varo String Quartet (Carmen Abelson and Hannah Christiansen, violins; Lena Vidulich, viola; and Isidora Nojkovic, cello) came together over their shared love for the existing string quartet literature and excitement about the possibilities for what the ensemble can become in the hands of today’s composers. Lauded for the “killer ambiance” (AudPod) of their concert experiences, the Quartet prides itself on inventive programming and spirited, intimate, and risk-taking performances. They are named after one of the three witches of Surrealism, the painter Remedios Varo, whose vibrant creativity, juxtaposition of themes, and lifelong pursuit of discovery inspire the Quartet to pair “music that everybody knows [with] music that nobody knows” in thought-provoking and unexpected ways.
The 2025-2026 season sees VSQ making their recital debut at The Block in Muskegon MI, in residence with Western Michigan University’s composition department, and returning to two favorite Chicago venues, the May Chapel at Rosehill Cemetery and Fulton Recital Hall at the University of Chicago. Other season highlights include a long-awaited double bill with Quince Ensemble at The CheckOut and the November release of Luis Fernando Amaya’s portrait album nacen en silencio, which features VSQ’s recording of Dialectico De Árbol No. 4.
The members of VSQ have backgrounds spanning many genres and have performed with groups including Chicago Sinfonietta, Ensemble Dal Niente, Japanese Breakfast, the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and Thurman Barker & the Cagy Bird Orchestra. Collectively, they hold degrees from DePaul University, the Manhattan School of Music, Northwestern University, Oberlin Conservatory, Rice University, and the University of Ottawa. Their work together as VSQ has unearthed a “penchant for playing in unusual spaces” and past season highlights include the 2024 premiere of Kristopher Bendrick’s large scale work for quartet and soprano, what it means to fall apart, the 2025 premiere of Noah Jenkins’s Poetics of Space Translation Symmetry with saxophone quartet ~Nois on Chicago’s Frequency Festival, a portrait concert of Grazyna Bacewicz at the International Museum of Surgical Science, and performing works of David Lang and Julia Wolfe with conductor Donald Nally (The Crossing) and the Northwestern University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble.
Quince Ensemble:
Quince Ensemble is a treble voice ensemble dedicated to changing the paradigm for contemporary vocal chamber music. Described as "the Anonymous 4 of new music" by Opera News, Quince continually pushes the boundaries of vocal ensemble literature. By performing almost exclusively the music of living composers, and actively commissioning works with a broad and curious aesthetic ear, they seek to create a landscape of contemporary vocal music that is embodied, complex, and expressive, with the musical boldness and virtuosity that is often reserved for instrumental groups.
As dedicated advocates of new music, Quince regularly commissions new works for voices, providing wider exposure for the music of living composers. In 2019, they launched the Quince New Music Commissioning Fund, a fund to grow the repertoire for women and treble voices. Through educational activities, Quince works to bring this music to a larger community of singers and listeners, offering new and empowering pathways to vocal excellence. Quince has released four studio albums, Realign the Time, Hushers, Motherland, and David Lang's love fail, all available on iTunes, CD Baby, Spotify, Bandcamp, and Amazon.
Quince has been featured on many festivals and series like KODY Festival in Lublin, Poland in collaboration with David Lang and Beth Morrison Projects, the Outpost Concert Series, the Philip Glass: Music with Friends concert at Issue Project Room, University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium, and the SONiC Festival in New York, to name a few.
Comprised of primary vocalists Liz Pearse (soprano), Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (soprano), and Carrie Henneman Shaw (soprano), and a roster of fabulous guest artists, Quince thrives on unique musical challenges and genre-bending contemporary repertoire.
Nicole Lizée
Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald, Australia), “utterly inspiring” (I Care If You Listen, NYC) and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation” (Winnipeg Free Press), award winning composer and video artist Nicole Lizée creates new music inspired by eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.
Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.
Awards include the 2024 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year, the 2023 Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, the 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Opera (her opera received six Dora Awards), the 2019 Prix Opus for Composer of the Year, the 2017 SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek Award, the 2013 Canada Council Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music and the Canada Council Robert Fleming Prize for achievements in composition. She is a Lucas Artists Fellow (California) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (Italy). She was selected by acclaimed composer and conductor Howard Shore to be his protégée as part of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards. In 2017 she created the music for the National Film Board of Canada’s logo. This Will Not Be Televised, her seminal piece for chamber ensemble and turntables, placed in the 2008 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 Works. Her work for piano and notated glitch, Hitchcock Études, was chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music and featured at the 2014 World Music Days in Wroclaw, Poland. Additional awards and nominations include an Images Festival Award (2016), three Prix Opus nominations for Composition of the Year (2013, 2019, 2024), and two Prix collégien de musique contemporaine, (2012, 2013).
In 2001 Nicole received a Master of Music degree from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 60 works is varied and distinguished and includes the Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Proms, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Banff Centre, Bang On A Can, So Percussion, Ligeti Quartet, Southbank Sinfonia, Donaueschingen Festival, the National Film Board of Canada, Against the Grain, Eve Egoyan, stargaze, the Australian Art Orchestra, l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, CBC, Radio-Canada, NYC’s Kaufman Center, Joby Burgess/Powerplant, Music on Main, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Ben Reimer, Vicky Chow, Tapestry Opera, Standing Wave, Gryphon Trio, NYC’s MATA Festival, TorQ Percussion, Fondation Arte Musica/Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, E-Gré National Music Competition, Innovations en Concert, Continuum, Soundstreams, SMCQ, Thin Edge New Music, Arraymusic, Megumi Masaki, ECM+, and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. Her music has been performed worldwide in renowned venues including Carnegie Hall (NYC), Royal Albert Hall (London), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam) and Cité de la Musique (Paris) – and in festivals including the BBC Proms (UK), Huddersfield (UK), Roskilde (Denmark), Bang On a Can (USA), Classical:NEXT (Rotterdam), All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK), Barbican’s Sound Unbound (UK), Metropolis (Australia), Sydney Festival (Australia), X Avant (Canada), Luminato (Canada), Other Minds (San Francisco), C3 (Berlin), Ecstatic (NYC), Switchboard (San Francisco), Melos-Ethos (Slovakia), Casalmaggiore (Italy), and Dark Music Days (Iceland).
Nicole was the Composer in Residence at Vancouver’s Music on Main from 2016-18.
She is a Korg Canada and Arturia artist
Paul Novak
Paul Novak is a Chicago-based composer and flutist. His "spellbinding" (Washington Post) music immerses listeners in shimmering and subtly crafted worlds full of color, motion, light, and magic. His recent projects engage with dreams and memory, queer identity, climate change and the natural world, and psychosomatic illness.
From 2026-2029, Novak will serve as composer-in-residence of the California Symphony, where he will collaborate with the orchestra and music director Donato Cabrera on three new commissions over the course of his three-season residency. His 25/26 season includes premieres and performances by Orchestra of St. Luke's, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Chicago Composers Orchestra, the JACK, Formosa, Balourdet, Attacca, Alinea, and Varo Quartets, ZOFO, Blackbox Ensemble, and more. Novak's recent projects include forest migrations, an orchestral piece commissioned by American Composers Orchestra inspired by the movement of forests around the world in response to environmental threats; impossible inventions, commissioned by Balourdet Quartet, which reimagines a string quartet as a series of fantastical sci-fi machines; and seven dreams about my body, a “stunning fantasia” (ICIYL) suite of microtonal interludes for Blackbox Ensemble inspired by his strange recurring dreams during the pandemic. Novak’s other recent collaborators include the Reno Philharmonic, Austin Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Grossman Ensemble, Music from Copland House, DanceWorks Chicago, Sandbox Percussion, Ekmeles, Quince Ensemble, Decoda, Earplay, Musiqa, Left Coast Ensemble, cellists Dmitri Atapine and Alexander Hersh, and Quatuor Diotima. His music has been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, New World Center, and Chicago's Symphony Center.
Novak's honors include a Fromm Foundation Commission, a Barlow Endowment Commission, and an Underwood/Earshot Commission; other recent recognition includes several ASCAP Morton Gould Awards and BMI Composer Awards, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Martirano Competition, SCI/ASCAP Commission, Red Note Competition, League of Composers/ISCM, Left Coast Ensemble, Lake George Music Festival, and National Association of Composers of the USA. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, Aspen, Norfolk, Copland House, Millay, and I-Park, and was featured in the Washington Post's "23 for '23: Composers and Performers to Watch this Year," where he was praised for his "impressive range and restless energy" in a catalog spanning "lithe, elastic vocal pieces...vibrant orchestral works...and evocative etudes for string quartet." The jury of the Luigi Nono Prize wrote that his music was "irresistibly imaginative" with "breathless and swirling energy" and a "highly individual artistic voice."
Novak is the co-artistic director and flutist of Chicago-based ensemble Mycelium New Music, which presents imaginative, multidisciplinary performances of contemporary music that showcase diverse emerging voices. Highlights of Mycelium’s 25/26 season include collaborations with pioneering composer-performer Pamela Z, visual artist Ruby Que, yangqin player Cheng Jin Koh, and soprano Kristina Bachrach, and compositions by rising star composers including Saad Haddad, Baldwin Giang, Sofia Jen Ouyang, and Charles Peck.
Collaboration and interdisciplinarity are at the center of Novak's creative practice, and his recent work has been driven by a passion for working with text, an attunement to the embodied experiences of musicians, and a fascination with collective, social aspects of performance. His work draws inspiration from literature, visual art, dance, and poetry, from biological and astronomical phenomena, and from history and myth. His recent projects have included collaborations with poets, visual artists, dancers, choreographers, and a spoken word artist.
Originally from Reno, NV, he completed his undergraduate studies at Rice University, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas.
Kari Watson
Kari Watson (they/them) is a composer, performer, and intermedia artist whose work explores the intersections of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic composition, live performance, and interactive installation. Their composition practice is cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative, often involving workshop-driven processes that prioritize collective exploration and exchange. As a performer playing analog synthesizers, they engage a customizable spatialization software built in MaxMSP with spatial speaker arrays to further explore issues of tactility and drama in immersive sonic environments.
They have collaborated with a wide range of performers and ensembles both in the United States and abroad. Most recently, they have worked with Percussionist Jennifer Torrence, Violinists Maya Bennardo and Sarah Saviet, Yarn/Wire, Collective Lovemusic, cellist Eduard Teregulov, Ensemble Dal Niente, TAK Ensemble, the MIVOS Quartet, Line Upon Line, the Chicago Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra, Quatuor Diotima, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, and Sandbox Percussion, among others.
Watson’s work has been presented at leading international festivals and institutions, including the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE), Donaueschinger Musiktage (DE), the MINU Festival for Expanded Music (DK), the Composers Now Dialogues Series with Tania León, the Ravinia Festival’s Breaking Barriers Festival with Marin Alsop, Les Écoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau (FR), Chicago’s Frequency Festival, the Ear Taxi Festival, and at the New Music Gathering. Their performances and collaborations have also been programmed on series such as the CLEAT Series and the Pleiades Series at Elastic Arts, Yarn Wire’s Currents Series at Roulette in NYC, Experimental Sound Studio’s Florasonic and Patchbent Series, and on International Anthem’s 11x11 Series with Katinka Kleijn.
Recently featured by Musical America as their New Artist of the Month (February, 2025), Watson has received several awards and distinctions for their work such as the 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize for Composition from the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and a 2022 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Furthermore, their work has been recognized and supported by Broadcast Music Industry, the Musicians Club of Women, and New Music USA, and they have collaborated on projects funded by Arts Council England, SWR Kultur, DCASE in partnership with the Chicago Cultural Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Watson plays modular synthesizers as a soloist and as one half of a duo project with cellist Katinka Kleijn with a recent release of their debut album VISTAS on Elektramusic (June 2025), and an upcoming international tour in the UK and EU in January, 2026. Their debut album, enclosures, was released with Sawyer Editions (January 2025) and has since been reviewed in the June 2025 issue of the Tempo Journal (Cambridge University Press), listed in the Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, January 2025, by Peter Margasak for Bandcamp Daily, and listed by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore as one of the top records of 2025. Words about Watson’s music have appeared in several publications such as Seismograf Mag (DK), The Wire (UK), Cambridge University Press’s Tempo Journal (UK), The Washington Post, the Chicago Classical Review, the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune and Ruch Muzyczny (PL).
Current projects include collaborations with UK based mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton and Clarinetist Heather Roche, as well as ongoing collaborations with cellist Katinka Kleijn, sonic artist Lou Mallozzi, composer/synthesist Aaron Holloway-Nahum, and videographer Luana Borges.
Watson holds a BM from Oberlin Conservatory in Composition, with a minor in TIMARA (technology in music and related arts) and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago on a full fellowship from the Division of the Humanities.