Marcel Paul Maximin Ciampi (29 May 1891 – 2 September 1980) was a French pianist and teacher. He held the longest tenure in the history of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris
and also became head of piano classes at the
Yehudi Menuhin School
The Yehudi Menuhin School is a specialist music school in Stoke d'Abernon, Surrey, England, founded in 1963 by violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin. The current director of music is the British classical pianist Ashley Wass. The school is on ...
in England.
Life
Ciampi was taught by
Louis Diémer
Louis Joseph Diémer (14 February 1843 – 21 December 1919) was a French pianist and composer. He was the founder of the Société des Instruments Anciens in the 1890s, and also gave recitals on the harpsichord. His output as a composer was exte ...
at the Paris Conservatoire and won the first prize for pianoforte in 1909. He had a career as a concert pianist, appearing with orchestras in France, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Prague, Warsaw, Sofia and Athens. He worked with
Claude Debussy.
He turned to teaching and had a particular influence on
Hephzibah Menuhin
Hephzibah Menuhin (20 May 19201 January 1981) was an American-Australian pianist, writer, and human rights campaigner. She was sister to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and to the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. She was also a linguist ...
and her sister
Yaltah Menuhin. He accepted Yaltah at age four, after hearing her play
Robert Schumann's ''
Kinderszenen
' (, "Scenes from Childhood"), Op. 15, by Robert Schumann, is a set of thirteen pieces of music for piano written in 1838.
History and description
Schumann wrote 30 movements for this work but chose 13 for the final version. The unused mo ...
''. His students also included
Yvonne Loriod
Yvonne Louise Georgette Loriod-Messiaen (; 20 January 1924 – 17 May 2010) was a French pianist, teacher, and composer, and the second wife of composer Olivier Messiaen. Her sister was the Ondes Martenot player Jeanne Loriod.
Biography
Loriod ...
,
Cécile Ousset
Cécile Ousset (born 23 January 1936) is a French pianist.
Cécile Ousset was born in Tarbes, France, and gave her first recital at the age of five, subsequently studying at the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10 with Marcel Ciampi (who had fo ...
,
Thea Musgrave
Thea Musgrave CBE (born 27 May 1928) is a Scottish composer of opera and classical music. She has lived in the United States since 1972.
Biography
Born in Barnton, Edinburgh, Musgrave was educated at Moreton Hall School, a boarding independ ...
,
John Carmichael,
MÃcéal O'Rourke,
Jean-Marc Luisada
Jean-Marc Luisada (born 3 June 1958) is a French pianist born in Bizerte, Tunisia. He started on the piano at six years old, "the normal age".
Biography
At the age of 16 he began studies at the Conservatoire de Paris under Dominique Merlet and M ...
,
Pierre Hétu
Pierre Hétu (April 22, 1936 in Montreal – December 3, 1998 in Montreal) was a conductor and pianist. He studied music from 1955–57 at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal with Germaine Malépart (piano) and at the ...
,
Kathryn Stott,
Melvyn Tan
Melvyn Tan Ban Eng (; born 13 October 1956) is a Singapore-born British classical pianist, noted for his study of historical performance practice.
From a young age, he went to England to study, first at the Yehudi Menuhin School when he was twel ...
,
Nancy Bricard,
Avi Schönfeld
Avi Schönfeld is a Polish pianist and composer. He was born in Lodz, Poland on 15 December 1947.
Life
Schönfeld gave his first concert in his native Poland at the age of 19 before going to Israel to become a pupil of the Bartók disciple Il ...
,
Beryl Sedivka, Albert Attenelle, Anna-Marie Globenski,
Éric Heidsieck
Éric Charles Heidsieck (born 21 August 1936) is a French classical pianist.
Biography
Born in Reims, Heidsieck gave his first recital at the age of nine and his first concert with orchestra a year later.
He studied with Marcel Ciampi then ...
,
Jacqueline Cole, and Sally Sargent. Another of his students was
John-Paul Bracey, who was to become his biographer.
[
Ciampi recorded some early electrical solo and chamber music discs for French Columbia.] His available recordings on CD include César Franck
César-Auguste Jean-Guillaume Hubert Franck (; 10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in modern-day Belgium.
He was born in Liège (which at the time of his birth was pa ...
's Piano Quintet with the Capet Quartet.
His wife, Yvonne Astruc, was a violinist.
His compositions include Six Studies for the piano. He was a jury member on competitions such as the Alexander Brailowsky
Alexander Brailowsky (16 February 1896 – 25 April 1976) was a Russian-born French pianist who specialised in the works of Frédéric Chopin. He was a leading concert pianist in the years between the two World Wars.
Early life
Brailowsky was bo ...
Competition in Liège and the Eugène Ysaÿe
Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe (; 16 July 185812 May 1931) was a Belgian virtuoso violinist, composer, and conductor. He was regarded as "The King of the Violin", or, as Nathan Milstein put it, the "tsar".
Legend of the Ysaÿe violin
Eugène Ysaà ...
Competition in Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
.
Ciampi was appointed an Officer of the Légion d'honneur
The National Order of the Legion of Honour (french: Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur), formerly the Royal Order of the Legion of Honour ('), is the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. Established in 1802 by Napoleon ...
and the Belgian Order of Léopold
The Order of Leopold ( nl, Leopoldsorde, french: Ordre de Léopold, ) is one of the three current Belgian national honorary orders of knighthood. It is the oldest and highest order of Belgium and is named in honour of its founder, King Leo ...
. He died in 1980.
References
Sources
* Eric Blom, ed., Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edition (1954)
Further reading
* John-Paul Bracey, ''A Biography of French Pianist Marcel Ciampi: Music To Last A Lifetime''
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ciampi, Marcel
1891 births
1980 deaths
Musicians from Paris
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
20th-century French male classical pianists
French music educators
Piano pedagogues
Officiers of the Légion d'honneur