Coronado is welcoming back the Villa-Lobos International Chamber Music Festival! The series of concerts takes place between Jan. 8 and Feb. 11, 2025, with three different performances in Coronado as well as an outreach program to the Coronado School District. All Coronado events are free.
Villa-Lobos International is led by Dr. Lars Hoefs, who is the founder, artistic director and cellist. Lars started playing the cello at four-years-old in Wisconsin. He laughs when he says that at the age of four he wasn’t sure where the music would lead, but he started taking it pretty seriously around 13.
He shares, “I studied in a couple of different places, and I ended up doing grad school at USC in Los Angeles. I went to the festival in Alaska while I was a student and I met this musician from Brazil. He’s the one who first invited me to a festival in Rio in Brazil. That’s what awakened me to the Brazilian classical music, especially the Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos.”
Lars fell in love with Brazil – the culture, the music, and the people. He shares, “I went back every year, and I tried to stay a little longer each time. I spent the entire year of 2009 there. I had a job and an orchestra. Then I got a teaching job as professor at Sao Paulo State University in Campinas starting in 2013 and I’ve been there ever since.”
As far as the people he loves in Brazil, one stands out among the rest. Lars’ wife, Aline Alves, is Brazilian. He shares their story, “she’s originally from the state of Minas Gerais from a town called Araguari. We’re married and she teaches piano, she has a flourishing piano studio with lots of famous students.”
Villa-Lobos International Chamber Music Festival Jan 8 – Feb 11, 2025
Lars enjoys coming back to San Diego every year during the Brazil summer vacation. This is their 10th anniversary of having the festival, the third year in which they conduct concerts in Coronado. Lars expresses, “We’re very fortunate that we’ve been getting grants from the City of Coronado and the Cultural Arts Commission to make it possible.”
City Allocates $1 Million in Community Grant Funds – Coronado Times
On putting together the concert series, Lars explains, “I do all the work organizing and it’s a lot of fun but it’s also a lot of a lot of work. It’s all Latin American. It is accessible, fun, beautiful and varied. We have quite a few musicians playing for the first time with us and then we have others who have played with us before.”
Festival Inspiration
Lars shares what to expect during this tenth year. “This year we’re doing more music from other Latin American countries. The last couple of years we really had a monopoly on Brazilian music. It was 90% Brazilian and a little bit of other stuff. This year, it’s a lot more spread out.”
While there is still a focus on Brazilian music, Lars is drawing more from Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and other parts of Latin America. Lars says, “It’s always been the mission of the festival is to perform, promote, celebrate, and educate about Latin American chamber music – chamber music is small groups like quartets, and quintets. Since I’m living in Brazil and with my wife, we always end up doing more Brazilian music than other countries so now we’re really making an effort to find and include more. There’s so many fantastic and fascinating composers and music from all these other parts of the of Latin America.”
As far as the multi show festival is concerned, Lars encourages the community to check out all three. “It’ll be completely different. I’ll be there for all three, but I’m not the main attraction. I’m just the one organizing.”
Coronado Show One: Invitation to the Danzon (Jan. 10)
Of their first Coronado show of the year on January 10, 2025, Lars shares, “It went really! It was in the Winn Room at the Coronado Library, and it was totally packed. This was with the Blue Rose Trio and with Aline on piano.”
“We had a piece by Lalo Schifrin who is the composer of the Mission Impossible theme,” Lars reflects on the Jan. 10 concert. “Everyone knows this music, the beautiful chamber music. He’s from Argentina. Another interesting part of the program is a Cuban composer named Paquito D’Rivera. Kind of Latin jazz inflected chamber music. Our clarinet is Karl Pasch who’s from Alaska. He’s got some terrific jazz chops, he can really improvise.”
Coronado Show Two: Capricious Distances (Jan. 17)
Lars shares what you can find at this week’s free show at the Coronado Library in the Winn Room. “It features Marcelo Soares, a Brazilian violinist who lives in LA. He’ll be playing a bunch of really virtuosic pieces. I like to call him the Brazilian Paganini because he plays Paganini and other pieces really well. He will be joining Alini and myself for Friday’s concert.”
Coronado Show Three, the Festival Finale: Maestro Prazeres and the Villa-Lobos International String Orchestra (Feb. 8.)
At their final show, Villa Lobos will move from the Coronado Library to the Spreckels Center Grand Room. Joining this show is soprano Lisa Parente, a San Diego native.
“She was recommended to our festival by Dawn Richards, who is on the Coronado Cultural Arts Commission. Dawn is always a huge help for our festival in promoting it. Lisa Parente will be singing as well as pianist Dr. Ching-Ming Cheng. Dr. Cheng is also a professor at CSU San Marcos. We’ll be doing some pieces in Spanish and Portuguese language, so that should be very interesting. Very beautiful, very lyrical collections for that concert.”
Lars continues, “It’s a larger group so we’re able to put together a string orchestra. We have a conductor coming in from Brazil to do a bunch of really exciting Brazilian pieces for string orchestra. His name is Carlos Prazeres and the core the nucleus of the string orchestra is made of Latin American performers, if you could include me as Latin American.”
Included in the string quartet is Marcelo Soares (violin), Karoline Menezes from Brazil (viola), Andrés Martín from Tijuana (bass), Lars Hoefs from Brazil (cello). Filling out the rest of the Villa-Lobos International String Orchestra are string players from San Diego.
Lars mentions that to accommodate the performance and the audience, the Grand Room at the Spreckels Center will be adding in risers and creating a stage.
Coronado Schools Outreach
While Lars is proud of the shows, another big component of the festival is Coronado community outreach. Lars shares, “We did this last year, and it’s also part of the grant from the City of Coronado. We go into classrooms and perform and talk with the kids about Latin American music. We work with Shane Schmeichel [CoSA Director of Special Programs]. He helps us coordinate with the different teachers. Last year we did quite a few where we went into Village Elementary School and Silver Strand Elementary School. We took over their Spanish class and the teachers helped us direct the conversation. We would play a piece and tell them a little bit about the piece and then answer questions.”
Lars laughs, “There are lots of fantastic questions from these kids! Not just about music or about Latin America but it ends up really becoming very interesting the things that we end up talking about. Our mission of educating, it’s simple – it’s presenting and playing this music that people never heard, but also giving space and giving this attention to music by Latin American composers and performed by Latin American artists.”
For 2025, Lars says, “This year we’re doing even more of that. We’re going back to classrooms like we did last year but they’ve also organized larger assembly performances to have more. In February, we’re going to have a larger group quintet perform for a slightly larger group of students at the Coronado schools as well.”
New Work
Lars is really proud of the new work they can share at their concerts. “We always have commission and premiere new work. It’s not just Latin American music but much of the music is by living composers and often they are composers who write music especially for our festival and then we perform it for the first time in the festival. Not every concert has a premier but some of them do and those are those are listed on the on the festival website. It says ‘world premiere.’”
Villa-Lobos International Chamber Music Festival
Lars shares, “The last few years we’ve been recording albums and releasing albums on digital streaming platforms.” So if you love what you hear, check out Villa Lobos on Spotify and Apple Music!
@VillaLobosInternational • Villa-Lobos: Spotify
