String quartet the Cuarteto Casals are breaking the Spanish musical mould in more ways than one, writes Michael Dervan.

It's all got a kind of familiar ring to it. A group of musicians form a string quartet while they're still at college. After a few years they start winning top prizes at international competitions. Their career takes off. They get a recording contract, good reviews, and the major international engagements start rolling in.

However, in the case of Barcelona-based string quartet the Cuarteto Casals, who are coming to the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, this is actually a most unusual story. Spain has not exactly been renowned for its string quartets, its string players, or even for the quality of its music-education system.

Enter Paloma O'Shea, patron of the arts, wife of the billionaire banker Emilio Botín, and founder of the Santander Piano Competition, whose laureates in the 1980s included both Barry Douglas and Hugh Tinney.

She founded the competition in 1972, and two decades on used her connections and clout to set up the privately-funded Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid in 1991. The school was founded to sidestep the parochialism of Spain's professional music training.

Talking to the members of the quartet in their airy first-floor rehearsal studio in a Temple Bar-like setting off the Travessera de Gràcia in Barcelona, I mentioned a 1990s article from the Strad magazine about how terrible string teaching was in Spain. "It was, it was," they chorused in response.

"There was no tradition in normal schools to have good teachers," explains cellist Arnau Tomàs Realp. "The Reina Sofía School changed the dynamic. Now in other schools, they have made a lot of changes, and things are improving. For example, we are now teaching here in Barcelona. When I was young it was not possible to find any quartet of a good level who could teach you chamber music. The first thing I had to do was to go abroad, or to Madrid, to the Reina Sofía School. These were the only options."

The Reina Sofía School brought some of the greatest players and teachers from around the world to Madrid, and provided a valuable shock to the existing conservatories, where it was most unusual to find foreigners on the staff. Paloma O'Shea, who as her name suggests is of Irish descent, was friendly with the likes of Rostropovich, and he was among the people whose advice she sought on hiring teachers for the school. On a practical level, the Cuarteto Casals is living proof of how well the formula worked. The group, which was founded in 1997, won competitions in London (2000) and Hamburg (2002), and has become the first Spanish chamber ensemble to establish itself with a reputation at the highest international level.

As students, of course, the young players weren't exactly thinking that far ahead. But they seemed to have known that chamber music was where their future lay. The two violinists, Vera Martinez Mehner and Abel Tomàs Realp, didn't cherish ambitions to be soloists. They were 18 and 16 when the quartet was founded, and chamber music, they discovered, was just right for them.

Viola player Jonathan Brown, who has been with the group for five years, didn't originally go to college to study music. But "the viola came along" and as a viola-player he realised that chamber music was what he wanted to do. Playing in a string quartet was the obvious destiny, because "there's nothing like the string-quartet repertoire for the breath and depth that it offers".

The developments in teaching have been paralleled in other areas of Spanish musical life. The support structures for career development are good. "I'm one of the people who has had the most scholarships in the world," says Arnau. "I've lived, like, 12 years from scholarships. They make a lot of jokes about it in my house."

"There are new concert halls and new chamber series all over the place," explains Brown, "in Barcelona, Girona, Valladolid, León, Leida, Valencia has a new orchestra." Back in the early days, jokes Martinez Mehner, it looked as if it would take "a miracle" for them to succeed. "We knew what we wanted to invest in this project. It was very difficult at the beginning, because all the doors were closed to us. There was no tradition for a string quartet, especially one with Spanish people playing. We spent a year together in Madrid, and then we went to Germany. Once we were in a culture where there were more string quartets, where there was a tradition, you could get to know very good teachers, find out what was happening in this world and where the competitions were, and we got in there and everything began to move. Then, when we came back to Spain, doors started opening."

It's a process that's not unique to Spain, they say. They played in Vienna recently, and were told that if you're Viennese you have to go away first in order to become famous in Vienna.

Late-comer Brown remarks on the players' dedication and commitment to making a success of the group. "I wasn't there, but I understand that from the beginning no one was interested in doing the quartet half-way. It was either doing it all the way - it's going to be a successful, professional quartet - or we'll work on other projects. Which is not common. A lot of young quartets start with good ideas and stars in their eyes, but don't necessarily have the same at the end." There were plenty of sacrifices along the way. "The worst of the suffering was before my time," laughs Brown. "There was still a little after I joined, but they endured most of it before me." Nowadays, the quartet is a very democratic institution. "We have a relatively sophisticated language and system of checks and balances," says Brown. "We're not a quartet that yells at each other and throws things and cries. There are quartets that do, and thankfully we're not one of them.

"We divide up the rehearsal time so that each person will have a block of time to work on what they really want to. Each person has to have their own list of priorities, what they want to fix in any particular section of music. With a quartet, the work never ends. If you wanted to, you could spend years working on one movement and it still wouldn't really be quote, unquote, perfect." No one has to fight for time or for their voice to be heard. And they arbitrate on differences over phrasing, fingerings and bowings - matters to get string players hot under the collar - by having one member listen without looking, to make sure the differences are actually both audible and significant. The idea, they explain, is to find a way of getting rid of the multitude of musicians' personal biases that the listener can't actually hear objectively.

In spite of the meticulous approach to preparation, they like to remain open to gestures of spontaneity in performance. "Everything you do needs to be adjusted on the basis of hearing and intuition. You can have too much thinking, too much talking, too much analysing," says Arnau. And unplanned things to happen on the spur of the moment in concerts, "preferably not too many, but . . ."

Like most musicians, they declare themselves focused on working out the composers' intentions. But even here, they're not closed to intuitive responses that can't be fully explained. "There are certain things that you can't articulate with words, or that you can't defend with logic," says Brown.

There's clear agreement about the style of quartet playing that has influenced them most, that of the Hagen Quartet from Salzburg. But it's also a matter of horses for courses. The Borodin Quartet are a reference point for Shostakovich, the Quatuor Mosaïques and the Apponyi Quartet for Haydn. These last two are period-instruments groups, and the use of light vibrato and the pursuit of clear sound "so that you can really hear what's going on in a piece" are important aspects of the Casals's musical aesthetic.

There's also clear agreement about the kind of playing they've been reacting against, but they refuse to name names. A rich coating of consistently heavy vibrato, they say, is something that turns them off, as is the old-fashioned style of playing which is leader-dominated to the point of presenting the three lower instrumental parts as if they're somehow secondary to the first violin.

Old-style leader domination is something that's impossible for them anyway. The two violinists, Vera Martinez Mehner and Abel Tomàs Realp, rotate between first and second violin parts. "If it's more in the Classical era, Abel leads, if it's more in the Romantic era, I do. It's so normal that we don't speak about it," says Mehner. But it's not a hard and fast rule. "It depends on the characteristic of the piece," explains Abel, "in relation to our characteristics of players." Brown sees the switching as an advantage. "When they switch it does change the sound of the quartet. It helps a Mozart quartet sound that much more different from a Shostakovich quartet." But then he muses that in their recordings of Mozart early string quartets, where they switched from time to time, he would no longer be absolutely sure which violinist is playing which part. It's like everything else about this fascinating group, clear and logical on the one hand, but subtly mysterious on the other, anything but black and white.

The Cuarteto Casals play at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which runs from Sat, Jun 30 until Sun, July 8, www.westcorkmusic.ie