Fundación Banco Santander collaborates with Fundación Albéniz in the following activities designed to spread a wider knowledge of classical music and encourage its study at the Reina Sofía Music School.

Fundación Banco Santander is one of the main sponsors of the musical season at the Teatro Real in Madrid, which comprises operas, dance events, recitals and concerts of different styles of music (classical, flamenco, pop, etc.).

These are accompanied by parallel activities and educational initiatives to bring the performing arts to wider audiences. The Junior Real programme offers shorter versions of operas and choreographies and concerts with explanations to make them more accessible to children. The training programme, targeted at artists starting out in the opera world and others keen to expand their knowledge, comprises courses and workshops on some of the main composers and titles in the history of this musical genre.

My Opera Player is an online platform where subscribers can watch a varied selection of videos and live performances of operas, concerts, dance events and other shows produced by some of the world’s most important theatres.

Fundación Banco Santander is one of the sponsors of the musical season at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.

On 7 January it sponsored the recital offered by the tenor Javier Camarena, accompanied by his usual pianist Ángel Rodríguez, with a programme that combined arias from French and Italian operas from his repertoire with Neapolitan and Spanish songs.

From 7 to 25 April, the Foundation’s support was instrumental in facilitating the performance of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart–Lorenzo da Ponte trilogy, made up of Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, with musical direction by Marc Minkowski and stage direction by Ivan Alexandre. Staged in three consecutive cycles, the proposal presented a successive insight into the operas and their main characters.

Fundación Banco Santander is one of the sponsors of the Orfeó Català Choir School, which provides voice and musical training to more than two hundred children and young people between the ages of 6 and 25. The school comprises five choirs—Cor Petits, Cor Mitjans, Cor Infantil, Cor Jove and Cor de Noies—the members of which move on to sing with the Orfeó Català. An artistic team made up of conductors, pianists, music theory and singing teachers shape the voices of the young singers and provide them with the experience and technique they need to join a professional adult choir.

The choirs perform with prestigious singers and orchestras from the music world and their broad repertoire ranges from a capella music to choral symphonies.

Fundación Banco Santander is one of the friends of honour of this amateur choir that was founded over a century ago and enjoys extraordinary international prestige.

The choir’s repertoire features more than fifty operas and zarzuelas, a hundred choral-symphonic compositions and numerous folk songs and polyphonic works.

The Orfeón gives more than forty concerts a year and regularly performs at the most important music events in Spain (San Sebastian Musical Fortnight, Santander International Festival, Soria Autumn Music Festival, Granada Festival, etc.) and Europe (Salzburg, Lucerne, Rhine and Montpellier festivals, Ruhr Triennale, etc.).

Many of its performances have been recorded by the main classical music labels.

The Bach Madrid Project was created to provide continuity to the intense work that the conductor Oscar Gershensohn has carried out for more than two decades on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach.

With a programme featuring the Brandenburg Concertos, orchestral compositions for soloists and most of the German composer’s choral symphonies, the Bach Madrid Project has performed at numerous international festivals and venues.

The Foundation provided crucial support for the concert organised by Nova Lux Artean on 22 December 2022 at the Pontifical Church of San Miguel in Madrid. The audience enjoyed a series of Christmas oratorios and cantatas performed by a vocal and instrumental ensemble that specialises in the Baroque repertoire.

In 2022 Fundación Banco Santander collaborated with this private concert promoter that brings classical music to audiences in Spain. Ibermúsica supports the training of young musicians and the creation and organisation of concert cycles featuring prestigious international orchestras and soloists.

The Foundation sponsored the concert offered on 26 May 2022 at the National Auditorium of Music in Madrid by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrey Boreyko. The programme featured Lutoslawkis’s Little Suite, Grieg’s Symphony in C Minor and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Behzod Abduraimov as guest pianist.

Before launching into the programme, the orchestra performed the Ukrainian national anthem as a sign of protest about the war.

From 1 to 29 August the 71st edition of this festival took place in the city of Santander, resuming its usual programme of concerts by prestigious international artists without any audience restrictions. Fundación Banco Santander sponsored the closing concert in the Argenta hall of the Cantabria Palace of Festivals.

The Czech National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Semyon Bychkov, was accompanied by the pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque, the organist Daniela Valtova Kosinova, and the voices of the Orfeón Donostiarra, the soprano Evelina Dobraceva, the mezzo-soprano Lucie de Hilscherová, the tenor Alěs Briscein and the bass Jan Martinik.

The programme featured three exceptional works by Czech composers: Carnival Overture Op. 92, by Dvorak; Concerto for two pianos and orchestra, H. 292, by Martinu; and Glagolitic Mass, by Janacek.

The Foundation renewed the loan of a 17th-century cello to Asier Polo, acclaimed by critics as one of the finest musicians of his generation.

The instrument was made circa 1689 by Francesco Ruggieri, a luthier at the prestigious Cremona School. Admired for their powerful voice and sweet sound, his models were fashioned from the finest wood and beautifully varnished.

This cello has two unique qualities that make it even more special. Firstly, it was made before 1700, the year when Stradivari established definitive standards for the construction of violins and cellos, so its proportions are different from those of the modern cello. And secondly, it was commissioned by the church to be played at religious services. The body contains a hole, now covered, through which a strap was inserted to allow the player to hang the instrument from his neck while taking part in processions.