Salerno-Sonnenberg, Assads Are Perfect Blend

Listening to the Assad brothers is a bit like hearing four hands playing one large guitar. The interaction of the Brazilian siblings is so precise, so perfectly synchronized, that it reaches far beyond musical partnership--even between brothers--into a kind of creative symbiosis.

Add to that the violin playing of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, whose fiery individualism and blindingly accurate virtuosity sometimes calls to mind the image of a classical Jimi Hendrix, and one can expect, at the very least, an entertaining evening.

Tuesday night at Largo, a jam-packed house experienced all that, and more, when Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Assads made a one-performance stopover at the close of a tour supporting their new self-titled Nonesuch album.

The music, which ranged from Eastern European traditional pieces to works by Django Reinhardt and Astor Piazzola, was as unrestricted in style as were the skills of the players.

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Sergio Assad’s arrangement of seven traditional Hungarian melodies in “Gypsy Songs,” for example, afforded Salerno-Sonnenberg the opportunity to display the brisk lightheartedness of her style, her capacity to generate an extraordinarily rich sound with a feathery bowing technique. The familiar Russian chestnut “Dark Eyes” and Reinhardt’s lovely “Nuages” were recast by Assad into rhapsodic showcases for Salerno-Sonnenberg. In each case, she found the heart of the music. Capable of great passion with her playing, she always framed it within the natural boundaries of the music.

The support she received from the Assads was so lush with sound, so full of tumbling, overlapping rhythms that it was hard to believe it was simply the product of two acoustic guitars.

And, supplementing the astonishing intimacy of their own musical linkage, they connected with Salerno-Sonnenberg with a pure musicality that defined the essence of what quality chamber music is all about.