our hundred rapt listeners in Reynolds Auditorium hold their breath. The luminous personalities of the players flicker gradually through the great nexus of sound: the violist hearty and good-natured, the cellist insistent, one violinist passionately partisan, the other calmly engaged.

The quartet in rehearsal: from left, Eric Pritchard, Hsiao-Mei Ku, Jonathan Bagg, and Fred Raimi photo:Les Todd

By turns they adopt one another's attitudes, mimic a turn of phrase, move their bows in tandem, or are off at a tantivy like squirrels round a tree. They could be dancers circling a cobra, jailers surrounding a pretender to the throne, or a forest fire just this side of being under control. But they are the Ciompi String Quartet, and tonight is the first concert of their thirty-seventh season at Duke.

You read the music in their bodies. During Beethoven's Opus 18, #4, in C minor, they share the same air, the four inhaling in tandem at the start of a phrase as if not one of them could breathe independently of the others. There are nods, eye contact, furrowed brows.

First violinist Eric Pritchard, his legs splayed out closest to the audience, articulates with his spine and emotes with his features. In succession, you see bliss, amusement, agony pass over his face as he leans forward, relaxes, falls back. He lifts his eyebrows suggestively and out from his instrument wafts an amorous phrase.

Second violinist Hsiao-Mei Ku, the sole woman on stage, remains less demonstrative, her equanimity an anchor for the Sturm und Drang around her. Her elegant silver-gray gown contrasts with the severe tuxedos of the men. Her expression remains cool, her flourishes restrained. She intervenes, underscores, matches the others at every step, and when at last the violins burst into a duet, her sound intertwines indistinguishably with Pritchard's and lingers in the still air. She has the pellucid smile of da Vinci's La Gioconde.

Jonathan Bagg, the tallest of the four, clasps the viola in his large hands, then unself-consciously caresses it with his cheek. As the music builds, he raises his feet slightly off the floor, holding back. Then suddenly comes a lyrical motive in the viola and he half rises to meet it, coming bodily off the chair for an instant as his instrument evokes an ancient mystery. He settles again.

Cellist Fred Raimi's visage becomes a study in fierce concentration during a marcato passage, like a carving of an ancient samurai guarding the emperor. He gives his great white mane a shake to emphasize an accent, then again, again, relentless. With his pursed lips, he seems to be crooning to his instrument.

"It's like watching four people who are married to each other having a really good discussion," says Marilyn Hartman, the Ciompi's manager and longtime fan.

The Ciompi Quartet was founded on personality. Its origins lie with the virtuoso violinist Giorgio Ciompi, a performer with Arturo Toscanini and other greats, who came to Duke in the early 1960s specifically to start a quartet. These days his eponymous successors play some eighty concerts each year, presenting as many as forty different pieces, each of which must be polished to the appropriate translucence. They rehearse for several hours every weekday during the academic year, holding local benefit concerts for battered women, the U.N.'s anti-land mine project, Meals on Wheels, a synagogue, the Durham School of the Arts.

In its thirty-seven seasons, the quartet has been through six violinists, four violists, and two cellists-always one at a time, always with a smooth transition from player to player, and always keeping the same name. Some say its current configuration, in place for the past six years, may be the best ever. When the latest member, Eric Pritchard, came, "We did not have to start at square one," says his colleague Ku. "We were already at square eight."

Personality continues to drive them, but in a different way, as Pritchard explains. "There's no boss or leader. One person that feels passionately can often sway three people who are less committed to a point of view." "It's important for the individuals to be allowed to assert themselves," says Bagg. "One mistake some quartets make is that they assume there has to be this uniformity, or they don't feel really polished. If someone's sticking out a bit, they hammer him down so it sounds like a completely organic whole. But I think that's boring. They keep one another from speaking in their own voice."

Raimi shrugs. "The personality of the quartet is the sum and multiplication of the personalities of the four people in it."

Depending on whom you ask, the university is variously their favorite or their most stressful concert venue, or both. Besides the four formal concerts in the series, they might take on another twenty Duke performances at, say, faculty recitals and new-music concerts, in dorms, and at dinners for visiting dignitaries, such as last year's appearance before Canadian Prime Minister Jean ChrÈtien. "They have always been my first choice to embellish a formal evening," says President Nannerl O. Keohane.

"People recognize us as a good ambassador for the university," says Bagg. Besides dozens of concerts around North Carolina-Oriental, Wilmington, and an annual festival in Highlands, for instance-they play regularly in New York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago, and sometimes as far away as England, Bolivia, and the People's Republic of China. They will regale the willing listener with stories of life on the road-groupies who bike from Boston to New Hampshire to catch a performance; driving all night when a NASCAR rally had filled every hotel; Bagg's famous homemade spaghetti sauce. "And when the quartet shares an apartment at a festival," Hsiao-Mei Ku confides conspiratorially, "Eric always looks forward to it because he can barely boil water."

But what business does a full-time string quartet have at an institution dedicated to research, education, and patient care? Most universities other than those with a high-powered music conservatory, after all, have at best a quartet in residence for a week or ten days at a time.

"Most faculty string quartets remain invisible to the rest of the department as they pursue their own concerts and other performing activities," says Scott Lindroth, associate professor in the music department. "The Ciompi Quartet, on the other hand, has always sought opportunities to participate in all aspects of the music curriculum. So, in addition to studio teaching, the performance faculty also contribute to history, theory, and composition courses. Why play a recording of a Mozart quartet when we can have the Ciompi perform the piece for the students in class? And what better way to teach students about composing for the string quartet than to have the Ciompi play their pieces?"

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