It all started in four garages in Pozuelo: “Like a
start-up
, my children say ”. Something cutting edge was born in Spain in 1991. But not in technology, but in art, in education. At first, Paloma O'Shea convinced four teachers: Dimitri Bashkírov, pianist; Zakhar Bron, violinist; Iván Monighetti, cellist, and Daniel Benyamini, viola player… 27 students enrolled. The first and the pioneers of a method and a type of musical teaching that was going to break the mold. Now, 30 years later, in the current academic year of 2021, the Reina Sofía School of Music (ESMRS) boasts of having trained 800 musicians with successful careers or that 16% of the components of the Spanish orchestras have come from their classrooms. Apart from the fact that the careers of pianists Arcadi Volodos, Eldar Nebolsin, the Del Valle brothers began there; cellists of the stature of Sol Gabetta or Pablo Ferrández;quartets like Quiroga or Casals; relevant singers —Celso Albelo, Ismael Jordi or Aquiles Machado—, violinists like Ana María Valderrama; composers ...
Today the Reina Sofía School is one of the most cutting-edge musical training centers in the world thanks to the tenacity of its promoter, Paloma O'Shea (Getxo, 85 years old), and a team in search of excellence. A work that began without an established concrete plan, but with the will to radically change its field and that today many imitate for having turned something as delicate and complex as musical education.
"I am perfectionist. And that's a drag ”, says Paloma O'Shea in her office in the Plaza de Oriente. In it, echoes of the classes that keep the building in an active limbo and filled with music intermingle. From the window, the Royal Palace stands out, sifted by a neat winter sunset. But she is homesick for her bustling garages on the outskirts. “There were four of them, as I was saying, but we ended up taking over the entire urbanization. We spent our lives there. We ate together, Russian students bathed in a pool in January. But they worked beautifully. Sometimes with an apple they endured hours and hours of rehearsal ”.
Today they also give him hard. They keep the booths open between eight in the morning and twelve at night: “In the houses they could not dedicate so many hours. The neighbors would go crazy, ”says O'Shea. She knows what it's like to make amends for such a career. The Reina Sofía School was a consequence of the most logical thing in his life. In her case we are talking about a pianist with a vocation, determined in the fifties to make a career. “When I was 15 years old, I won the first prize of the promotion at the Bilbao Conservatory. I played in the Philharmonic hall; among other things,
Beethoven's Sonata Waldstein
;
Evocation
, from the
Iberia
suite
(Albéniz), and a work by Liszt that is now rarely performed,
San Francisco de Paula walking on the waves
”.
Before that, you didn't miss a concert.
"They fascinated and excited me so much that I told my mother that I wanted to study piano for eight hours a day."
Paloma O'shea poses with the members of the Quiroga Quartet (left), the pianist Luis del Valle and the violinist Ana María Valderrama.
Ximena and Sergio
He saw her so determined that she was sent to France at the age of 14 to prepare.
He began his career in music, but at the age of 22 he married Emilio Botín, the former president of Banco Santander, and he left.
They had six children, but she always knew that she would once again fulfill her destiny of full dedication to music: “Six children, 20 grandchildren, 4 great-granddaughters and 800 spiritual descendants, who are the students of the school.
It is my offspring… ”, he says.
He took his children to the Santander conservatory. All of them studied music theory and piano. Soon he understood how it could be of use. “There was a very dedicated teacher who has received little recognition. His name was Valcárcel and he organized a piano competition for the city ”. Why not make it national? O'Shea suggested. "What do you think Don Emilio is going to say?" The teacher asked him, cautiously. "You take care of the contest, I will take care of Don Emilio," replied the banker's wife, she remembers now.
Then his father-in-law lived. Patriarch Botín, a factual and financial power as president of Banco Santander in the Spain of the fifties, sixties and seventies. “He let me do what I wanted. He always supported my projects ”. As soon as O'Shea sensed doubts in his surroundings, Don Emilio Sr. resolved in his favor. So it was with the piano competition, which in its next edition celebrates 50 years in Santander. It was the germ of what the interpreter has developed later. Both from the Albéniz Foundation and the Reina Sofía School. For all this he requested loans from the family bank. "And I gave them back," he says.
During his student years and in the early days of his marriage, he did not stop going to concerts. Neither now. “Then he went to the dressing rooms and greeted the figures. So I was making good friends ”. Among the most intimate, the conductor Zubin Mehta, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the pianist Alicia de Larrocha. They were all important in those first steps. "All of them were in the germ of the school," says O'Shea. Mehta tells
El País Semanal:
“I encouraged her with the idea and advised her with the teachers. Then the rest, she did. He did not stop until he managed to build what is now one of the most important schools in the world. His enthusiasm never waned. It does not stop ”.
O'Shea also remembers Rostropovich in those first months. “Sitting at my house, on the phone. Calling musicians to teach. He recommended two of the first: Monighetti and Benyamini. Zakhar Bron was convinced by Mehta, and Bashkirov volunteered. I wanted to live in Spain at all costs. They had proposed to teach him in Salzburg, but he preferred our school ”, comments the promoter and president of the Albéniz Foundation. He does not say it without regret. Bashkirov died this year. He was a backbone in the institution. He never left the classrooms and created a whole legion of students who idolize him for his demands and for his contagious joy when teaching. “Everyone loved him. He rehearsed with the windows open, and the day he died, his house custodian came to the school to ask one of his students to play his piano as a last tribute.His death had caused a commotion in the Austrias neighborhood, where he lived, a five-minute walk from the headquarters, ”he says.
Paloma O'Shea, with Yehudi Menuhin in 1998. Pedro Martínez Albornoz
The first year served as a test.
O'Shea wanted to turn music education upside down.
“As the piano competition progressed, except for the first year, 1972, which Josep Colom won, the Spanish did not stand out.
And Colom won because he studied in France.
I was convinced that the educational system for music in Spain had very good teachers and very bad study plans.
I wanted to change it, ”he says.
So he started traveling to visit schools all over the world. “I could do it and I did. I had not gone to university, true, but I had made my life my own university by surrounding myself with musicians and intellectuals like Federico Sopeña or scholars like Enrique Franco, who taught me a lot ”, he says. "I preferred that to looking pretty for any party," he says. He visited France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union ... "The Moscow conservatory impressed me, especially the training of children." The good and bad. “If someone entered our contest and did not pass the relevant rounds, they were terrible with retaliation in Soviet times. They could remove them from the study, ”he recalls.
He was pointing out methods, scrutinizing models. In the end, two things became clear to him. They had to do with his quest for perfectionism. “That the small details make up the big and that for that it had to have the best teachers, apart from giving the students the possibility to act from the beginning. I remember myself still shaking my legs before going on stage. Acting before the public is the end of this profession and that must be approached in a natural way, without fear ”, he insists. Many students choose school for that reason. “We force them to dress well, they prepare the performance as if they were professionals. We even give them a small payment ”. And works. They have an auditorium within the school that is perfectly comparable to others where large cycles are offered.
It was also clear to him that he had to create a public-private financing system that would distinguish the management model. “The companies have been faithful from the beginning. And very generous, considering that we are in a country where a patronage law has not yet been approved at the height of the times. It is one of the pending subjects of all governments. They promise it, but we are still in limbo in that regard, ”says O'Shea. Therefore, they organized their own method: “We distributed it by instruments and we have more than 100. From the beginning, Banco Santander took care of the piano, Telefónica of the violins, the BBVA of the viola, Freixenet of the orchestra, the Areces Foundation singing… ”. The latter deserves a separate point.
It happened in the second year.
The school had already caused a stir with the first grade.
“So much so that Alfredo Kraus came to see me the second year and suggested that he wanted to collaborate, he was still active, but he wanted to transmit his philosophy of voice through teaching.
Then he brought Teresa Berganza, too ”.
With those teachers, what young singer did not want to enter the nascent school?
A concert, in the spring of 2019, at the Sony Auditorium of the Reina Sofía High School, founded by Paloma O'shea. Fernando Maselli
But it was not easy. The level of demand in the tests has always been decisive. "Nobody enters here by recommendation," says the president of the institution. Auditions are tough. Relentless. For the last year, 499 applicants were presented, who were given 179 tests. 37 were admitted. Currently, the school has 154 students of 34 different nationalities. Of all of them, a third are Spanish; the same, Latin Americans, and the rest, from other countries. A whole global pool of future musicians who admits them rigorously and fairly.
The only requirement that is not negotiated is talent. Whoever proves to host it will have no obstacles so that it can develop in the best conditions within the school. “100% of the tuition is free. The cost of each student per year amounts to 45,000 euros. We take care of everything with scholarships. We move by exclusively artistic criteria, but also the social action of the institution is important ”, says O'Shea. "In that sense, 40% of our students come from families below the poverty line."
The lives of all of them change radically.
To enter such a center is to be sure that with effort and will, afterwards, each of the students will be able to dedicate their lives to music.
This has been the case with the members of the Quiroga Quartet, the Spanish formation of this category with a more solid international career.
Aitor Hevia (violin), Josep Puchades (viola), Helena Poggio (cello) and Cibrán Sierra (violin), its four members, met in the classrooms of the school and there they decided to group together as a group.
Paloma O'shea with professors Gustavo Núñez, Wenting Kang, Rocío Martínez, Radovan Vlatkovic, Mikolaj Konopelski, Galina Eguiazarova and Márta Gulyás. Ximena and Sergio
"For us, the Reina Sofía School represented the possibility of receiving the best specialized education as a string quartet that could be received in Europe," says Sierra from Salzburg, where today he teaches at the Mozarteum. “We had the best teachers in our discipline and they gave us the tools to turn our dream as musicians into our profession and our way of life. Thus, now, we return what we have learned to society, from the various public higher academic institutions where we teach and from the various settings in which we play ”, he adds. In this sense, the Queen Sofía also prints a character of conscience in the collective work and the role of musicians in society. Values, in short.
And an ambition to elevate the subject he teaches.
The school created school.
Since the level of musical education exists, it has grown qualitatively in Spain and today other centers outside of Madrid have become an international reference, such as the Musikene de San Sebastián and the Escuela Superior de Música de Cataluña (Esmuc), based in Barcelona, among others.
"It has marked a turning point in higher education for musical performance in Spain and has generated and stimulated new models in our geography comparable to those of our European neighbors, from the public and private spheres," says the Quiroga violinist.
Paloma O'shea, with her back turned, in the boardroom of the Reina Sofía School, based in the Palacio de Orriente, in Madrid.
Ximena and Sergio
Especially in specialization, something for which chamber music is fundamental. “The ESMRS gave our specialty a central role in the comprehensive education of the high-level professional musician. He has carved out a local pool of musicians who, after consolidating international careers, now become, for the new generations, close models that stimulate the conviction that from here, with a well-planned higher education, we can also develop a stable fabric and sustainable of large chamber groups, apart from instrumentalists, singers, interpreters or teachers ”. Sierra believes, in this sense, that Spain, since the institution where it was formed exists, "has thus contributed to redrawing the European map of education and musical performance."
That was Paloma O'Shea's original intention.
His early accomplices believed in this.
To this have been added the 90 teachers who make up the school campus today and the 70 people who work at the center.
The 30th anniversary of its creation has forced its founder to take stock.
The first tour that the student orchestra has carried out and that has taken them together with its head, the Colombian Andrés Orozco-Estrada, through Austria, Hungary and Slovakia gave its founder much to think about: “When I saw the boys in the Musikverein From Vienna, where the New Year's concert is held every year, I was thinking of the four garages where we started.
It has certainly been worth it.
And I understood perfectly when they told me a phrase that I love: 'Paloma, for us, school is good vibes.