LARS HOEFS
 Growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin, Lars Hoefs began playing the cello at age 4. A student in the Suzuki method, Lars also sang as soloist in boy choirs and church musicals. Around the age of 13 Lars was deeply drawn to music, eventually deciding to seriously pursue the cello. He finished high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts studying with Robert Marsh. While in Winston-Salem Lars formed a Cello Quartet, the Waughtown Four, a group which was awarded 2nd prize at the international Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. Lars went on to receive a Bachelors of Music from Northwestern University where he studied with the certifiable Hans Jorgen Jensen.
There he served as principal cellist of the University Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, and won the University Chamber Music Competition as a member of the Mandala String Quartet, a name inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. This last May Lars earned his Masters of Music from USC studying with Ron Leonard. Out of Los Angeles grew the Blue Rose Trio, with violinist Audrey Solomon. A clue to the meaning behind the name of the group can be found in the opening of David Lynch's film, Twin Peaks: Fire, Walk with Me.
     
While experiencing fleeting connections to many things, Lars has never been able to escape music's magnetic field for very long, and probably doesn't ever want to. Of the many forms that music assumes, the exploration of chamber music, for some reason, resonates most powerfully with his own inexpressible search. Recently Lars has been seeing and thinking differently, but with each discovery comes the unmistakable feeling that, deep down, things have always been this way.