Violaine Sananes plays Arpoador by Sérgio Assad on a 2025 Daryl Perry classical guitar. Under three minutes of music, and almost all of it depends on colour rather than on notes.
About Arpoador
Arpoador is the rocky promontory between Ipanema and Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, the place where the city goes to watch the sun go down. Assad's piece has the unhurried quality that implies: a melody that circles rather than develops, a harmonic language borrowed from bossa nova but written out with a composer's precision, and a texture that asks the guitarist to keep three things audible at once without letting any of them dominate.
Pieces like this are deceptively hard. There is no passage work to practise into place. What has to be built is a sound, and the only way to build it is to listen to every chord as it decays.
It is also a test of an instrument. A guitar with a quick, bright response can make this music sound restless; one with too much warmth can blur the inner voices until the harmony turns into a haze. What the piece wants is an instrument that separates cleanly and still lets notes hang in the air — which is exactly the territory a traditionally built concert guitar occupies.
About Sérgio Assad
Sérgio Assad is a composer, arranger and — with his brother Odair — half of one of the most influential guitar duos in the history of the instrument. His arrangements have become standards because he does not simply transfer notes to the guitar: he rethinks a piece for it. His own compositions, Arpoador among them, bring the same understanding to original writing. You can hear more of his music in our article on Stephanie Jones' Tiny Concert.
The Guitar
The Daryl Perry No. 264 from 2025 is a traditionally built concert guitar: spruce top in French polish, Indian rosewood back and sides, 650 mm scale, 51 mm nut, Alessi tuners, 1,440 grams. Perry has worked from his Winnipeg workshop since the early 1980s, using hand tools and selecting each piece of wood for its character, and his instruments are known for tonal purity and elegant understatement rather than for volume alone. Our portrait of Daryl Perry describes his approach.
Watch the Performance
You can hear Violaine Sananes in related repertoire in our article on her performance of Samba em Prelúdio, and find more Brazilian music in our overview of famous classical guitar pieces.
