Sérgio and Odair Assad performed in their first of three concerts as part of the Adelaide International Guitar Festival on Saturday. The Adelaide Advertiser says: "[They] performed a truly classical duet for acoustic guitars, interweaving, ornamenting, and supporting each other perfectly. Their program of South American pieces was highly expressive, showing masterful control of mood and tonal quality." Up next for the Assads at the Festival: two concerts this weekend with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra featuring Ravel's Rhapsodie Espagnole.

"We were raised in a country where the borders between different types and styles of music are not very clear." So says Rio-born guitarist Sérgio Assad, in an interview with the Adelaide Advertiser. In their upcoming concerts with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, as part of the Adelaide International Guitar Festival, Sérgio and Odair Assad present Piazzolla's genre-bending piece Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, along with Rodrigo's Concierto Madrigal.

This week, New York magazine's "Vulture" recommends Sérgio and Odair Assad's latest recording, Jardim Abandonado, as "a blissful testament to the richness of their pairing." Throughout the album, "the brothers perform a brilliant act of creative give-and-take." And on a record of astounding performances, the "Vulture" notes as "most appealing ... their subdued and lyrical 'Rhapsody in Blue'—a reminder of what can be accomplished when a guitar is in the right hands."

"Their speed, their gorgeous tone, their ease reaching over the body of the guitar to its extreme high range, their uncanny musical memories ... and their ability to play thousands of notes without a single clinker, click or buzz are the stuff of guitar gods," says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of Sérgio and Odair Assad's recent performance in Milwaukee. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reviewing their performance in the Seattle Symphony's guitar series, says that "the Assads displayed all the taste and refinement for which they are known ... their music gleams with such innate virtuosity."

The New Yorker says that Sérgio and Odair Assad's new album, Jardim Abandonado, includes works by Antônio Carlos Jobim ("exquisite miniatures of ardent desire and ineffable regret"), Milhaud, Debussy, Sérgio Assad, his daughter Clarice, and Adam Guettel, and the album's "pièce de résistance ... a transcription of 'Rhapsody in Blue.'" The Assads' arrangements "give all the pieces, whether popular or classical, an intimate sense of tonal richness and a new range of scintillating colors."