Camila Rios
Staff Writer
The University of La Verne department of music hosted “The French Hour” Friday at Morgan Auditorium, featuring songs by French composers Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel.
The performers included oboe player Zach Pulse, bassoon player Alex Rosales, pianist and La Verne adjunct piano instructor Hedy Lee and pianist Jackie Tu.
Pulse, Rosales and Lee are all members of a larger chamber group called the Cardinal Winds with Tu acting as a guest performer.
Cardinal Winds also consists of three more people who are away participating in other orchestra practices outside of the county.
“We’ve been doing a little bit of touring this past year with another larger group,” Lee said.
“Last year with our sextet, we did a series of plum pieces that we really liked, and meanwhile the rest of the band members were gone, we decided we wanted to keep building on those pieces.”
The Cardinal Winds won the grand prize in the 2015 Plowman Competition.
The musical competition gives non-professional musicians exposure by allowing them to perform in front of a very large crowd.
“We continued building our program after the others left, and we thought that we should have a lot of French music going on,” Lee said.
“We just felt that we should keep going in that direction and so far we really love it,” she said.
The performers all worked hard practicing and building the program for the last month and a half.
“Last year we played a sextet by Poulenc,” Pulse said.
“We really like his music, and he also wrote this trio and an oboe sonata that we wanted to play, so we decided to base our French program off of those two pieces of his,” he said.
The band began the program with “Sonata for the oboe and piano” by Poulenc.
They then went on to perform “Piece en Forme de Habanera” and “Ma mere I’Oye” by Ravel.
The band finished their performance with “Trio for oboe, bassoon, and piano” by Poulenc.
“Ma mere I’Oye,” which translates to “Mother Goose,” has a total of five movements.
Each movement tells a different type of story with alternating paces to invoke a variety of emotions in the listeners, like in the first movement.
The first movement concentrates grace as well as beauty into 20 bars of the song.
“The music encapsulates so much,” Lee said. “It vividly portrays a lot of the things that were going on in the French culture during the time of the 20th century.”
The audience responded enthusiastically at the end of every song that the group performed by giving them a loud round of applause as well as cheers.
“This music is just very full of Parisian experience of the early 20th century,” Lee said.
“Even though the world is a scary place, there is still so much left to explore and that’s what the music is representing,” she said.
The members of the band have been playing their instruments for more than 12 years.
Pulse and Rosales were both inspired to pursue music because of their parents.
“My mom really wanted me to play sax. Even though I never did, that’s how I got thrown on the music track,” Rosales said.
Lee’s parents put her into piano lessons after they saw her playing around on their piano as a child.
After meeting in the department of music at USC, they decided to form their musical group.
Camila Rios can be reached at camila.riosgomez@laverne.edu.
