Family Affair

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Growing up in a house full of music, Sergio Assad didn’t find it at all unusual that he would become a musician.

His father played the mandolin and his mother sang, although neither were professional performers.

But picking up the guitar “seemed like the normal thing to do,” Sergio Assad says.

He and his brother Odair Assad are one of the most acclaimed classical guitar duos in the world, and are in concert Sunday in Artemus Ham Hall at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

At age 12, Sergio picked up the guitar and took lessons from his father. Odair is four years younger than Sergio, but they began playing the instrument at the same time.

“Our father took the step of moving us from a small city in Sao Paulo to Rio de Janiero. He thought we were very good and could be professionals,” Sergio says.

As brothers, it was only natural that they would be in competition with each other. “We competed in many different things,” Sergio says. “But we did not compete musically. I thought he was better and I thought I would lose. We work as a team, we complement each other.”

They studied for seven years with Monina Tavora, who was a disciple of Andres Segovia. At a young artists’ competition in Bratislava in 1979, the duo won a major prize and their professional careers were assured.

The Assads have been performing together for 40 years, 35 of those years as professionals.

These days, Sergio teaches at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, and Odair lives in Brussels and teaches at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts.

“Odair was an extremely gifted player from the start,” Sergio says. “You can adapt your technical skills, but if you’re born with them, it makes life easier. I had to work much harder than he did. I had to develop other skills, like arranging.”

They perform works written especially for them by the likes of Astor Piazzolla, Terry Riley, Radamés Gnatalli and Marlos Nobre, but Sergio also has written many pieces in their repertoire.

The duo have performed with a regular who’s who of the music world, everyone from Yo-Yo Ma, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Fernando Suarez Paz, to Paquito D’Rivera, Gidon Kremer and Dawn Upshaw.

Sergio says their repertoire embraces Brazilian and European music as well as American jazz. “Everything is about a personal style,” he says. “I don’t think you can come up with something new, but you can come up with something personal.”

Living so far apart doesn’t affect their music, Sergio says, because “we worked so much together for so many years.”

The brothers also worked with the rest of the Assad family in 2004 at Brussels’ Palais des Beaux-Arts. They toured with three generations of the family, with father Jorge on mandolin and the voice of their mother Angelina. In addition, their sister Badi played the guitar and sang, and Sergio and Odair’s children sang and performed on the piano and guitar.

A live CD and DVD were released of the concert.