The Ciompi-Withers Duo

As an undergraduate at Duke University (1966-1970), I had the good fortune of studying with two outstanding performers, pianist Loren Withers and violinist Giorgio Ciompi.  In fact, they concertized widely together during those years as the famed Ciompi-Withers Duo.

Professor Withers (1920-1996) held a degree from the University of Kansas and two degrees from Juilliard, having studied with Ernest Hutcheson, Carl Friedberg, and James Friskin.  He received numerous awards and grants and was nationally recognized as an outstanding teacher.  I remember him as a sensitive interpreter who imbued in us a keen sense for phrasing and direction in music.  Long after I graduated, after I began concertizing again in the early 1980s and was looking for some outside coaching, I paid him a visit again at the Duke campus to take advantage of his interpretative and technical insights.

I majored in piano, but I also played violin at a high level during my years at Duke.  Giorgio Ciompi (1918-1983) was a true violin virtuoso, and my studies with him included such advanced works as an unaccompanied Bach partita, Paganini Caprices, and solo works by Fritz Kreisler.  At the time I knew little about Ciompi’s background, but in recent years I have learned some intriguing details about his life.  Born in Florence, he received the Prix du Conservatoire in Paris and became a professor at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice.  Because of their involvement in the anti-fascist movement, he and his wife had to flee Venice in 1943.  After the war, he was invited to join Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony and emigrated to New York.  He became head of the string department at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1955 and came to Duke in 1964.

Ciompi was also active in the creation of the North Carolina School of the Arts, which is how I came to study for two months at the latter’s 1968 summer session in Siena, Italy (see here).

My only regret about those years is that I was too young to appreciate fully these two fine teachers and the extraordinary opportunities they made available to me.