ONLY the best is good enough for a child, Maria Kelemen likes to say - and she's not talking about trainers or mobiles or the latest electronic games whizzgizmo. She's talking about teaching. Kelemen and her husband, Ronald Masin, came to Dublin two decades ago, founded the Young European Strings, and have been giving Irish children the best in violin tuition ever since, writes Arminta Wallace.
Now it's time to celebrate. They're marking their 20th anniversary with a concert at the National Gallery of Ireland next Tuesday, November 18th, which will bring three of their most successful graduates - Catherine Leonard, David O'Doherty and Gwendolyn Masin - together with the current YES orchestra.
The young musicians will present a programme which includes two concertos by Vivaldi, a Tchaikovsky serenade and Raymond Deane's Suite for Chamber Orchestra - and they'll play it all from memory.
A prodigious feat? Not if you look at children the way Kelemen does. "In our society we think the child is just a little half-creature, eating, sleeping and smiling at us," she says. "That's where we're extremely wrong. From the age of two-and-a-half a child can be taught any kind of discipline if you go at it with structure, with humour, with play. Not play in the sense of not taking it seriously - but in the sense of appealing to the imagination. A child whose imagination has been tickled is willing to do anything. Their enormous energy needs only to be channelled."
Energy is something Kelemen understands, being possessed of apparently unlimited quantities of it herself. Blunt, forthright and mischievous by nature, she also intuitively understands children. "It's in my blood," she says. "I'm coming from a big line of pedagogues. My mother was a piano teacher in Hungary and so was my grandmother." At a time when there is a good deal of talk about reassessing and reinventing our one-size-fits-all education system, we might do well to listen to what specialist teachers have to say. Kelemen shrugs. She used to think she could change the world, she says. Now she just does what she can, where she can.
One thing she won't water down, however, is her conviction that children must start young if they are to be up to speed with their chosen activity - be it music, ballet, swimming, athletics or football - by their mid-teens. "I teach them how to read music from day one. Get the eye moving from left to right. Concentrate on one note. And they know that it's good - because, hey, nobody else can do it. Mummy can't do it. Daddy can't do it."
Each child is assessed before beginning lessons at YES. Some are ready for individual tuition; others are placed in a group where they work according to the principles of the Kodály method, using singing, clapping and miming games. In the early years a parent is always present at lessons for help and support. From the beginning, however, the emphasis is on maximising the child's potential. Even the tiniest tot, for example, is taught to take the stage like a pro. "Two weeks before a concert, I ask the mother to put on a chair the teddy bears and the dolls," says Kelemen. "And every evening when they finish their practice, they pretend they're playing a concert for the dolls. So the child learns: 'I'm going to play from the beginning to the end. I'm not going to stop. This is my concert; I bow, and I finish.'"
Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and educator who believed that musical skills give children an unbeatable cognitive advantage in every aspect of their lives. Kelemen has adapted his methodology to suit the very different lifestyle of contemporary Ireland, but the basic philosophy is the same. "It's not about the violin," she says. "They learn how to focus; they learn how to memorise. We have kids who can play 70 minutes of music from memory by the age of 11. If you can do all that, you are light years ahead of your peers. That four or five years that I am gaining gives them wings. They don't need no Red Bull."
Born in Budapest, Kelemen left Hungary as a teenager and went to Amsterdam. There she met and married Masin, who was leader of the Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra - now the Nederlands Philharmonic. In the mid-1980s they went to South Africa. "Well, I wasn't too enchanted by that idea," she admits. "Our daughter Gwendolyn was five and our son Patrick 15. It wasn't the best moment to go to Cape Town. But where I'm coming from, ideas are extremely important. So if my husband wants to change his job, I feel it would be criminal on my part to say no. Don't forget, I am a refugee. I came out when I was 17 from Hungary. So you don't stand in the way of other people's ideas."
But how did they end up in Dublin? Kelemen launches into an international whodunnit worthy of a Robert Ludlum novel. It involves a summer school in the Hungarian countryside, a breakfast meeting with an Irish educator and a mysterious phone call from Cork. At one point, a Dublin property developer is cajoled into renting out his fully-furnished show house to the family from Budapest via Cape Town. "I put an ad in the local supermarket. It brought me two students, and that's how I started," she concludes triumphantly. Then, after a heartbeat's pause: "You see, you innocent girl, you should never have asked this question. You wanted to know how we came here? Now you got the whole mouthful. You wish you didn't ask, huh?"
On the contrary. Like Molly Bloom, I'm cheering for the YES brigade. Now more than ever, we need teachers with the vision and determination of Maria Kelemen. So here's to the next 20 years — and then some.
For further details of next Tuesday YES concert, telephone 01-4927649 or see www.youngeuropeanstrings.com