Did you write them down, or are they lost?

 

I never wrote them down, but I remember them. They had lyrics, so I know them with the lyrics.

I started when I was 13 and stopped when I was 18 because I entered music school. I realized that academic people didn’t like that kind of stuff, so I stopped. But my foundation in music came from Brazilian popular music and choro. When I started writing again, what I did was a combination of classical forms and the popular music I knew so well. That wasn’t very well received at the time—people in Brazil didn’t value it much. But nowadays, they do! I believe I was among the first to explore that direction. Today, many people try to follow that path, but I guess

I was lucky to have started much earlier, following examples like Astor Piazzolla or Radamés Gnattali.

 

I think I found a way out of complexity. Music, in general, starts simple and becomes more complex in each period. Eventually, it must shift, because if it becomes too complex, it loses touch with the public. You need both: good musical thinkers and people who can combine thought with feeling in a way that still connects with audiences.​ It’s nice to be complex, but you have to find the right balance between complexity and appeal. When I was younger, some colleagues used to say: 'Ah, you're doing minor things because you're trying to please the public.'

I didn’t see it that way – but those comments made me stop writing for a while.
 

We musicians need the public to survive, but at the same time, it’s a challenge to please audiences while also offering a certain degree of intellectual depth. That quality exists in the music of Stravinsky, Ravel, and others from the 20th century; but we lost touch with the general public during that time.

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The strangest thing about post-war musical movements is that they rejected history while still insisting on progress. To me, it’s strange to “dance” on top of Everest while pretending Everest isn’t underneath.

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Yes. The idea that music follows a linear path has some truth to it. You always build on what came before. After dodecaphony and serialism, we had a new direction – new ways of composing that lasted a while. But that was just one particular language. Eventually, the possibilities for breaking tonality, rhythm, and melody began to run out. We waited a long time for a new breakthrough – and ended up with minimalism. 

 

For a time, people rejected mixing elements from the past – I think that period is over. People are combining all things done in the past and don’t have a problem anymore to grab this and that in order to make a recipe of their own.​ I don’t think there’s much more we can invent—unless we go into microtonality. Yes, we might come up with different things if we add microtonal intervals, but we no longer live music as a linear progression. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. We’ve entered a new phase of combinations, and that’s quite promising.

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Isn’t that change caused by the internet? The world feels smaller now, and past concepts seem to have lost relevance.

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Things move too fast today. For someone my age, it’s hard to keep up. You need a different kind of wiring to follow what’s happening. Very young people come already well-prepared to handle everything that's required nowadays. It’s more common now to find people speaking multiple languages and excelling in several fields. If I fell asleep and woke up 100 years from now, I’d probably be shocked and not even recognize the world.
 

Ondrej, to someone who’s 15 or 20 today, you’re already like an old computer running outdated software. New generations come with different, more efficient programs. It’s crazy how fast things go. And now you see young people playing guitar in ways that were impossible thirty years ago. They’re everywhere – like flies!

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Indeed, but still, you’ve managed to do so many things at a high level. You composed a countless number of remarkable works, arranged music, and maintained a guitar playing standard equal to Odair’s staggering level.

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I was very lucky to have a partner like him. Odair is exceptional. Among players of his age group,

I don’t think anyone could match him. Today, many young players are technically excellent, but his kind of dexterity is rare – he set a standard. I did all the writing and arranging for our duo, so I knew I could give him extremely difficult parts. In the beginning, we shared the leading voices, but around 1985 or 1986, I gave that up. I started arranging with the idea that he could handle nearly impossible things.

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This is maybe a foolish question – but what does it feel like to be one of the world’s top guitarists?

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I don’t feel that way at all, and I think Odair would say the same. Even when people tell you that you’re the best because they admire what you do, I look around and see many amazing musicians. What we tried to do was maintain the quality of playing we started with and approach everything with dedication. But I don’t think we did anything that others couldn’t also do.

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One of the Assad Duo’s trademarks is the fast articulation of upbeats: almost like a call-and-response. You even used it in the cadenzas of your concertos Phases and Originis.

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Actually, before I started using that in my own work, we had played some pieces with that technique. One was Les Cyclopes by Rameau, arranged by Sergio Abreu. Also, Tedesco used it in his Prelude and Fugue in B major from The Well-Tempered Guitars. I applied it in many ways, but the hardest was Egberto Gismonti’s Baião Malandro. It took a lot of patience—practicing slowly until we got it right.

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Now you play Baião like it’s breakfast music…

 

It feels easy now, because we’re used to it.

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Guitar society seems divided—those who play from manuscripts and those who play from editions. Take Castelnuovo-Tedesco as an example. What’s your view on the manuscript era?

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You're probably referring to the differences between original scores and edited “guitar-friendly” versions. Tedesco wasn’t a guitarist, so he wrote more like a pianist. Of course, when a guitarist gets the original score, they’ll make adjustments to make it playable – changing or omitting notes. If that’s done properly, respecting the composer’s intentions, it’s totally fine. I don’t see the point of playing the unplayable just because it’s written that way. A piece isn’t finished if the composer keeps changing it during every performance. But eventually, they have to write it down so others can play it – that doesn’t mean the notation is sacred. It’s just one version.
 

My advice is: if you want to respect the manuscript, prepare your own version with your own modifications. There are many valid ways to adapt a passage – and it can be interesting to add your own view.

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​Still, when a non-guitarist composer writes, they can stretch the instrument’s limits.

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Yes, some things are physically possible but demand too much. They require some reworking. For instance, we don’t know how much Bream modified Britten’s Nocturnal. That piece is a great example – innovative, technically impressive, and playable. But we don’t know how much editing Bream did. There aren’t many other examples at that level – maybe some pieces by Rodrigo, Tedesco, Ponce. It’s just hard to write for guitar. Even someone like John Adams, who’s been asked many times to write for guitar, says he can’t – his musical imagination is too expansive for the guitar’s limitations.

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It's important that the guitar community continues this tradition of working with real composers, like Segovia and Bream did.

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That’s difficult to replicate, especially Segovia’s contribution...

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You said once that you don’t like Bach on guitar.

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It’s not that I don’t like it. At the time, I thought it was very hard to play Bach well on solo guitar. But I was proven wrong. Many young players play Bach beautifully – Judicaël Perroy, Goran Krivokapić. But they are rare examples.

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Your international career started in Bratislava! What are your memories connected to that?

 

Yes, that was 1979. We were ready to play concerts, but in Brazil we didn’t have many opportunities – maybe once a year in Rio or São Paulo. We met composer Marlos Nobre, who was working for UNESCO and recommended us to represent Brazil at the “Rostrum of Young Interpreters” in Bratislava. It was a general music competition – not just for guitar – and we were the only guitarists there. The jury selected five winners (no rankings), and we were among them. That gave us confidence in our international level and brought us invitations from all over Europe. In 1980 we played in New York, in 1981 in Paris. We were even invited to perform at the final of the Paris Guitar Competition. Those were very exciting years.

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Over such a career, did you find favorite cities to return to?

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I’ve been to so many places... I love Paris, but more than cities, I love regions. I love the Mediterranean: Italy, Spain, France. I feel less connected the farther north I go. Being Latin American, we feel a bond with Mediterranean cultures. Recently, we’ve been to new places like Zagreb and had a great time. Some places, like Budapest, we haven’t played yet and I’d love to go.

 

Bratislava also holds a special place – we returned there 30 years after that first competition. It was emotional. We saw the theater again – it revived memories. It was our first big stage, and the audience’s reaction was something we’d never experienced in Brazil. That was the first time we felt what we were doing was truly meaningful.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​