BBVA - Press Room

The presentation ceremony for the inaugural concert to be offered by the Queen Sofía School of Music to open the 2009-2010 academic year was held today at the Sony Auditorium of the Albéniz Foundation. The concert will take place at 19:30 on Wednesday October 21 at the Symphony Hall of the Queen Sofía National Auditorium. The event was attended by Sonia González, BBVA’s director of Institutional Communications, Paloma O’Shea, the chairwoman of the Albéniz Foundation, Peter Eötvös and Fabián Panisello, the Academic Director of the Queen Sofía School of Music.

The concert is being offered by BBVA, the sponsor of the School’s Viola Chair. The program for the concert by the Queen Sofia School of Music’s Sony Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Peter Eötvos and with the presence of the cello soloist Mikolaj Konopelski, includes the Eötvos composition Wind Octet, which was written for the Music for a School project of the Queen Sofia School of Music, and will be heard for the first time in Spain at this concert. The other works on the program include György Ligeti’s Concert for Cello and Orchestra and Béla Bartóky’s “Divertimento for Strings”,  Sz 113. 

The Albéniz Foundation dedicates the opening concert to the memory of the great pianist Alicia de Larrocha who died in Barcelona on September 25. De Larrocha was honorary vice president of the Albéniz Foundation and of the Santander International Piano Competition as well as a member of the board of trustees of the Queen Sofia School of Music and advisor to its Piano Chair.

BBVA’s patronage of the Queen Sofia School of Music – which falls under the aegis of its Corporate Responsibility policy, and in which education forms the key component -  started in 1995, when it sponsored the Chamber Music Chair. Since 2001, the bank has been the sponsor of the Viola Chair. This chair is led by Professor Diemut Poppen, with the leading music world figure Zubin Mehta acting as advisor.  BBVA’s initiatives in support of the Queen Sofia School of Music encompass all aspects of the center’s activity, including both teaching and artistic performance. BBVA thus joins the Albéniz Foundation and the Queen Sofia School of Music in supporting music training and access to musical culture in Spain, as the bank strengthens its ties with learning and culture.

The Queen Sofía School of Music, which opened in October 1991, has become a center of great international prestige, due to the excellent education it offers. The pedagogical project is based on contracting the best teachers for each specialty, who are then given complete liberty in terms of curriculum and teaching methods. In the course of its existence, the School has attained its main foundational goal:  to contribute to the modernization of the country, putting Spain on the exclusive circuit of top level musical education, and demonstrating that in Spain, one can aspire to be the best, even in a field as competitive as music. The School’s financing model combines business sponsorship with state funding in a manner that is unprecedented in Spain, and which permits every student that shows outstanding talent to receive the best top-flight education in the world, regardless of his or her financial resources. Today, some one hundred young people from Spain and other countries – with an especially significant presence of students from Latin American countries - are studying various specialties, an education that is complemented with the presence of great masters invited to give Master Classes and the student’s participation in some 200 public concerts all over Spain.

Since it was founded in 1993, the Queen Sofía School of Music’s Sony Chamber Orchestra has been directed by Zubin Mehta, Leon Fleisher, James Judd, Lorin Maazel, Enrique García Asensio, José Luis García Asensio, Yehudi Menuhin, Víctor Pablo, Támas Vásáry, Péter Csaba, Maximiano Valdés, Luciano Berio, Jesús López Cobos, Jordi Savall, Miguel Ángel Gómez Martínez, Stefan Lano, Hansjörg Schellenberger, Juanjo Mena, Sir Colin Davis and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Antoni Ros Marbà is chief conductor. The orchestra has delivered publicly and critically acclaimed performances in Spain’s leading concert halls - the National Auditorium of Music, Madrid’s Teatro Real, the Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona, Valencia's Palacio de la Música and the Palau de la Música Catalana, as well as in some European venues, such as the Academia di Santa Cecilia in Rome.  It has also made concert tours in Portugal and France. Furthermore, the Orchestra has made numerous recordings, with highlights including those made for Sony Spain, Spanish National Radio’s Radio Clásica, Spanish National Television and the Italian magazine Amadeus.

Peter Eötvös was born in Transylvania, 1944. At the invitation of Pierre Boulez, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique de Paris, and was named musical director of the Ensemble InterContemporain, a post he held until 1991.

Since his Proms debut in 1980 he has made regular appearances in London. From 1985 to 1989 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He was First Guest Conductor at the Budapest Festival Orchestra from 1992 to 1995, and held the same position at the National Philharmonic Orchestra, also in Budapest. He was Chief Conductor of the Radio Chamber Orchestra of Hilversum from 1994 to 2005. From 2003 to 2005, he was First Guest Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has held the same position at the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna since 2009. He was Principal Guest Conductor for modern and contemporary repertoire at the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra between 2003 and 2007.

In 1991 he founded the International Eötvös Institute and Foundation, and in 2004 the Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in Budapest for young composers and conductors. His compositions and operas are regularly performed worldwide by leading orchestras. His music is published by Editio Musica (Budapest), Ricordi (Munich), Salabert (Paris) and Schott Music (Mainz).