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News > Assads bring brotherly affection to guitar concerto
Assads bring brotherly affection to guitar concerto September 7, 2006 Brazilian musicians Sergio and Odair Assad have carried their guitars around the world. What they seem to have left behind, according to Sergio, is the baggage that afflicts other filial relationships -- sibling rivalry. "We used to say that we had all the fighting we were supposed to have when we were kids," said Sergio Assad, who joins his brother Sunday and Tuesday at a Reno Philharmonic performance. "When we began to play together, those things went away." The Assads, an internationally known duo who perform a wide variety of music, will play their guitars in Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto Madrigal" with the Philharmonic. The Assads played the concerto earlier this week at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and they previously performed it in the early 1980s for Rodrigo himself when the composer, who lived from 1901 to 1999, celebrated his 80th birthday. Click here for online story. "There were lots of celebrations around his music," Assad said by telephone from his home in Chicago. "We were invited to play this concerto in one of the events. "» He said he liked it very much." The concerto features 10 parts that revolve around Renaissance-madrigal themes. Rodrigo, who was blind from age 3, wrote a number of noted works for the guitar and orchestra. He's also known for many other works, Assad said, but Rodrigo seems to have struck a strong artistic chord with the guitar. "What is striking to me is that he didn't play the guitar at all," Assad said. "But he could understand the guitar so well. His writing was sometimes arranged or rearranged for the guitar. Sometimes he wrote things that were not physically possible to play on the instrument. Sometimes his ideas were so advanced for the instrument, you had to figure out a way to do what he wanted. So his music is very nice and very challenging." As their collaboration demonstrates, the Assads are all about family. Although Sergio lives and teaches in Chicago and Odair lives in Brussels, Belgium, they spend a lot of time together on tour and developing musical projects with musicians including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. "We travel so much during the year, most of the time we spend together," Assad said. The Assads were raised in Brazil; their mother and father, are both amateur musicians, and their sister, Badi, sings and plays the guitar professionally. In fact, three generations of Assads -- the siblings, their parents and their own kids -- have performed together von Trapp-style on concert tours. His mother, Angelina, who's now in her late 70s, ended up a breakout star. "We had nice change of pace putting up the family show two or three years ago," Assad said. "We traveled here in this country with them. That was an incredible experience for us. Our parents were amateur musicians all their lives. They were good, especially in that tour. Our mother was a true revelation. Everybody liked here. She had such a strong presence. She got the biggest ovations. Now she's cutting a record in Brazil." The Assad brothers themselves have cut many recordings. One of them, "Sergio and Odair Assad Play Piazzolla," won a Latin Grammy in 2002. Earlier, they studied for seven years with Monina Tavora and made a big splash at a young artists' competition in 1979 in Czechoslovakia. Of course, playing guitars with an orchestra poses an acoustical challenge: How do you get heard above the strings and things? Amplification has improved enough, Assad said, to facilitate their playing. "New equipment today can still amplify the guitar quite a lot," he said. "You can be heard without changing the sound." And you don't want to change the sound on a Rodrigo concerto, given the composer's blending of musical expertise and style, deeply rooted in the Spanish tradition. "Rodrigo has a special mark," Assad said. "You can hear his music, and in a few seconds you know it's Spanish. All the colors in his music are embedded in that style." |
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