CLASSICAL MUSIC : Brazilian Classical Guitarists to Make S.D.-Area Debut
Few performers find themselves working under the accusation of acute perfection. In fact, most critics and reviewers avoid the term “perfect” with the singular determination that President Bush avoids uttering “tax increase.”
The Brazilian classical guitar duo of Sergio and Odair Assad, however, stand accused of this virtue by no less than Dallas Morning News music critic John Ardoin, who wrote in 1988, “There is very little to say about the Assad brothers. Anyone who heard their debut here two years ago for the Dallas Classic Guitar Society knows they are perfect.”
Under the auspices of the Grossmont Guitar Guild, these paragons of perfection will make their local debut Sunday at 8 p.m. at El Cajon’s East County Performing Arts Center.
Since their North American debut in 1979, the brothers have made an annual American tour. They were in Chicago at the end of January, where Sergio Assad described his “professional” homelessness in a phone interview.
“The place I call home would be somewhere between Brazil and Europe,” he explained. “Recently, my brother (Odair) married in Europe, and he is now technically a Belgian resident. When we are not on tour, I usually stay with him, but I have no fixed place to live.”
Although the brothers have been playing guitar together for the 25 years, they did not perform together in public until 1973.
“Our father taught us to play guitar, mainly Brazilian folk music. He was not a professional musician, so when we showed promise, we moved from Sao Paulo to Rio de Janeiro in order to study with one of Brazil’s best teachers, Monina Tavora.”
Tavora was quite strict with the Assad brothers, not allowing them to play in public for the first seven years of her tutelage. Since she had already produced an acclaimed guitar duo of two brothers, she was anxious to repeat her success with Sergio and Odair.
From their father, they remain partial to the popular music of South America, which is based on a folk tradition, but is not folk music per se.
“Some people call this jazz; some call it avant garde, but the Brazilians just call it popular music. The musical scene there is changing very fast, and only recently have listeners given up their prejudice for vocal music and are now ready to embrace purely instrumental popular music.”
On the serious end of the musical spectrum, the Assads have commissioned duo guitar works from several South American composers, including the Brazilian Radames Gnatalli and Argentine Astor Piazzolla.
For the Assads, Piazzolla composed a three-movement “Tango Suite,” a dance form with which his name has become synonymous.
“Of course, he composes more than just tangos,” Sergio Assad noted. “I know that he is now working on an opera in Paris with tenor Placido Domingo.”
Like tuba concertos and nonets, the specialized repertory of music for two guitars has not been a high priority for most Western composers from Bach to Webern. Because of this lack of authentic repertory, the Assads, like most duo guitarists, arrange much of their music for concerts and recordings from other sources.
“In the last century, however, Mauro Giuliani and Fernando Sor wrote for duo guitars, partly because they were accomplished guitar players. In the 20th Century, Rodrigo and Castelnuovo-Tedesco have taken up the cause. The guitar is a complex instrument to play, and is difficult to compose for. You don’t need to be a great piano player to understand how to write for the piano, but writing for the guitar takes a great deal of knowledge of the instrument.”
Avant garde La Jolla. Contemporary music buffs will have to make a difficult choice Thursday evening, when both Mandeville Auditorium and Sherwood Auditorium beckon.
On a rare visit, the Alban Berg Quartet will play Alfred Schnittke’s recent String Quartet No. 4 on its Sherwood Auditorium concert for the La Jolla Chamber Music Society. (Last fall, West Germany’s Auryn Quartet gave a fine performance at UC San Diego of Schnittke’s dense, probing Third String Quartet.)
At UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium, two of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds’ orchestral works will be performed by the San Diego Symphony, with soloists from the orchestra and from the UCSD music faculty. This will be the first American professional performance of “Whispers Out of Time,” the work for string orchestra that won Reynolds the coveted prize.
Dueling violins. In the category of more traditional classical repertory, Igor and Vesna Gruppman will solo in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins in A Minor with the San Diego Chamber Orchestra on Monday at Sherwood Auditorium.
Igor Gruppman is concertmaster of both the San Diego Symphony and maestro Donald Barra’s San Diego Chamber Orchestra, and Vesna is the former concertmaster of the San Diego Opera Orchestra.
Instrumental in translating and making arrangements for many of the Soviet musicians who performed with the symphony in last fall’s Soviet Arts Festival, Igor and Vesna are preparing for a concert tour that will take them back to the Soviet Union to perform with the Soloists of Leningrad (who performed at Symphony Hall in November, 1989) and with the Moscow State Orchestra. For their tour, they have commissioned a work for two violins from Russian composer Vladimir Tarnapolsky, whose commissioned work at San Diego’s Soviet Arts Festival made a favorable impression.