A Latino Flowering

It’s either the zeitgeist, or shameless demographic pandering, or some of both. But the 2002-03 arts season is something of a high-water mark for Southland arts organizations offering Latin American and Latino fare. There’s no cabal, no concerted effort to bring so much Latin work to town--some of it is passing through as part of regular national tours, some of it is business as usual at institutions such as the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, or the just reopened Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture in downtown L.A.

But many offerings have the flavor of special events. Two weeks of programming from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, dubbed “Latin Influence on U.S. Culture,” will feature a world premiere by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz alongside Silvestre Revueltas’ “Redes,” in January. March sees three dates devoted to John Adams’ “El Nino,” a choral retelling of the birth of Christ that uses Spanish verse from an 18th century nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, whom Adams calls “Mexico’s Emily Dickinson, but 200 years earlier.” Chamber music from Latin America, a Revueltas documentary, and poetry readings are also part of the Philharmonic’s package.

About an hour south, the Eclectic Orange Festival will offer almost two solid months, starting in October, concentrating on the arts of Latin America: Cuarteto Latinoamericano will play music from Piazzolla’s tangos to Villa-Lobos’ Brazilian-flavored works; the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico and the Orquestra de Sao Paulo, in its U.S. debut, will also perform mostly Latin American repertory. The festival will also spotlight the West Coast premiere of Argentine-born composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Passion According to St. Mark” (“La Pasion Segun San Marcos”).

At UCLA and in Orange County, the Kronos Quartet is playing music from its CD “Nuevo.” The Long Beach Symphony will have Latin composers on all but two of its six programs, and in November, the First International Latino Theatre Festival will take over the Japan America Theatre, highlighted by a summit of 70 playwrights, directors and actors, an academic symposium and 11 theater companies from nine countries presenting plays.

The cultural action isn’t confined to performance. One major offering, the San Diego Museum of Art’s just opened survey, “Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions,” focuses on young artists making an international splash.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The demographic reality is well known: In Los Angeles County, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, 44.6% of the population is of Latino origin, and the percentage of Latinos with household incomes above $75,000 a year has more than doubled in 10 years, to 14.4%. Orange County has a smaller Latino population (30.9%), but a higher percentage (21.6%) in high-income brackets.

Across the U.S., the impact of Latin culture has been on an upswing for a while. The third annual Latin Grammy Awards will take place Wednesday at the Kodak Theatre. Similarly, the Mexican films “Amores Perros” and “Y Tu Mama Tambien” have received enormous attention. Coming up: a Sundance hit with a mostly Latino cast, “Real Women Have Curves,” opens Oct. 18, and “Frida,” a film based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, opens Oct. 25.

But arts impresarios, pushed to explain this season’s confluence of Latino events, mostly point to aesthetics. Sandy Robertson, associate director of the Orange County Philharmonic Assn., presenter of the Eclectic Orange Festival, says a Latin theme for a music-heavy festival was “an easy call.”

“It came partly because there’s a very authentic and energetic blending of the indigenous culture with the European classical tradition,” she says.

Enrique Arturo Diemecke, a native of Mexico, is the recently appointed music director at the Long Beach Symphony and the longtime leader of the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico. He has spent his career balancing his love of European classical music--especially Mahler--with the Mexican and South American tradition. The Long Beach season--the first entirely of his devising--includes pieces by Chavez, Villa-Lobos, the Spaniard De Falla, and Diemecke’s own Don Quixote-inspired “Camino y Vision,” as well as the usual European evergreens.

“In Southern California, people seem to want to know about these composers, they want to see more,” Diemecke says by phone from Mexico. “I’ve done [Latin-American music] a lot with the L.A. Philharmonic, and I have experienced that audiences really enjoy it.”

He had especially good luck with a program of Revueltas and Ginastera at the Hollywood Bowl; he was met not only with a packed house and thunderous applause, but also requests for another, similar program. “Everybody just went crazy. It’s not what I have experienced in other parts of the world. It’s funny to see that on the East Coast or the Midwest. They say, ‘That’s OK, but that’s enough.’ In Europe, they’re curious about a piece, but they’re never curious about a whole program.”

Deborah Borda, managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, says her orchestra’s 2002-03 Latin program came in part from the 2001 Ojai Music Festival, “Music of and About the Americas,” which included works by Golijov, Revueltas, and Ortiz. Esa-Pekka Salonen “has always had a relationship with the music of Revueltas,” she says.

She also hopes that the programming could pull in new audiences. “Our marketing department will be marketing these programs in different ways, but it’s too soon to know” what impact they’ll have.

In Orange County, the impetus behind Eclectic Orange’s Latin theme was one piece of music: Golijov’s “St. Mark” Passion, which got its first rave reviews after its premiere in 2000 in Germany, and has been gathering steam since. Pushing dance music to biblical proportions, it’s so strong, according to Robertson, that it demanded other, similar works to give it context.

Golijov, whose work has drawn from South American, European, and Yiddish idioms, may be the poster boy for mixing musics across every border. “Looking back to the past century, I see that what has survived is not the product of dogmas but the music of shameless opportunists like Stravinsky, Strauss, Ravel, [Alban] Berg, Armstrong, Ellington, Miles Davis, the Beatles, etc.,” he told The Times in 2001. “It’s a good lesson. Beware of ideology, if you have something to say, say it with the means at your disposal at any given moment.... At the moment, I think that the Latin American immigration is a strong and irrepressible influence. Musically, it is tremendously rich, as is all music that emerges from widely varied sources. I’d say it’s hard to ignore. On the other hand, America will metabolize it and make it its own.”

The San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, whose own metabolizing excursions have ranged from the delicate chamber jazz of Bill Evans to the post-romantic pastiche of Alfred Schnittke, has recently dived into an eclectic array of Latin American music. Its latest CD, “Nuevo,” released in April, reworks pieces from all over the Latin American map, from Golijov to bachelor-pad guru Esquivel.

“You can hear the distant past and the future all at the same time,” Kronos violinist David Harrington says of what drew him to the music in Mexico. The group’s first local performance from “Nuevo” was Sept. 13 at UCLA, with an all-female mariachi band and a member of Tijuana electronica combo the Nortec Collective. In October, Kronos will play as part of Eclectic Orange.

“The Zocalo, which is the main square in Mexico City--I lived there for a couple weeks one time,” Harrington says, “and I had the most amazing experiences: In the very early morning we’d be awakened by a military band as the flag was raised; there’d be young Aztec dancers later in the day, maybe a rock group in the afternoon, then the bells of the cathedral. And right under the cathedral are the remains of an Aztec temple, with Diego Rivera murals right there. That amazing sense of time. There’s an amazing amount of music that takes place in a very small location.”

Harrington has been studying Mexican music for about seven years. “Nuevo,” he says, is the fruit.

Harrington guesses that the surge in Latin programming might be a reaction to the U.S.’ growing self-absorption. “In a time when a lot of our country is not looking around very much, people in the artistic process are realizing how important it is to continue to look at what surrounds us.”

Visual art may have entered a similar period of internationalism. “Some art historians talk about this as a post-NAFTA age--a different kind of awareness of the U.S. and the countries on its borders,” says Betti-Sue Hertz, who curated “Axis: Mexico,” which concentrates on two generations of artists who she says have left irony, self-conscious nationalism and the medium of painting behind.

“There’s also been a huge influx of Mexican art into the States,” Hertz says, and some of this comes from a push by Mexican President Vicente Fox, who increasingly uses the cultural ministry as a diplomatic tool to woo U.S. interest.

Indeed, the Mexican government has been aggressive recently about pushing Mexican culture, whether funding tours or arranging exhibitions. A show of art from Mexico’s Spanish colonial period, which originated at Mexico City’s Franz Mayer Museum with the blessing of the Fox government, is touring the States. A four-week festival of Mexican music coming to the Kennedy Center in Washington next spring was funded in part by the Mexican government. The Fox government reportedly has made use of “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” hardly a flattering portrait of Mexico, as a symbol of cultural achievement.

Besides mainstream institutions waking up to Latin-flavored art, venues with long-standing commitments to the form are going strong.

“I think this is long overdue,” Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and a serious fan of Mexican music, says of the offerings. “And the main reason for it is that Latin America has been so stereotyped in the past. You tell people about Mexican music, and they picture a hat band, or a mariachi band.” But programs from the Philharmonic and Eclectic Orange--as well as the Latin American art museum’s musical schedule, which includes an Oct. 25 festival of troubadour-style canto nuevo--will show audiences how much range Mexican music covers.

Even though Mexican nationalist composers like Revueltas and Chavez have developed a profile, Luke says, music of Mexico’s romantic period is only just now getting a hearing in the U.S. and even Mexico. “Mexicans were playing beautiful waltzes that were later played in Vienna,” says Luke, explaining that romanticism was suppressed after Mexico’s revolution. “It was considered reactionary, bourgeois. People have no idea that this stuff existed; it’s like a secret.”

The spokeswoman for the International Latino Theatre Festival, Pilar Marrero, says it’s high time for such an event in L.A.; Miami, New York and Texas all have similar festivals, she says. “Los Angeles has the largest Latino community; it’s just unconscionable that L.A. does not have a similar event.”

The scheduling of her festival is also due, she says, to the heavy attendance of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, which just marked its sixth year in July. “It’s proof that the Latino community does not just watch TV and listen to commercial radio,” Marrero says. “People go out to films in droves.” She expects the theater festival to draw mostly, though not exclusively, Latinos, because the plays will be in Spanish or Portuguese.

Why the convergence in 2002? “It’s not out of the kindness of anybody’s heart,” says the Museum of Latin American Art’s Luke. “It’s like what happened to Italian Americans 50 years ago--a bigger middle class. There’s a massive market out there that’s totally untapped and ready to go. As soon as you open the door, there’s a flood.”

Diemecke is not so sure why mainstream institutions have suddenly woken up to his longtime interest.

“I don’t know, it’s a good question,” he says. But how to respond is easy: “I think it’s a great opportunity,” he says, “and we should take it.”

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Fare for the Fall

LONG BEACH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Through the first four concerts of the season, the orchestra, led by Mexico native Enrique Arturo Diemecke, performs works by Chavez (Oct. 12), De Falla (Nov. 23), Villa-Lobos (Jan. 18) and Diemecke (March 1).

Information: (562) 436-3203 or www.lbso.org.

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ECLECTIC ORANGE FESTIVAL

Cuarteto Latinoamericano performs Orbon, Golijov, Piazzolla and Villa-Lobos (Oct. 13).

Kronos Quartet performs selections from “Nuevo” and the semi-staged work “Altar de Muertos” by Gabriela Ortiz (Oct. 15).

The West Coast premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Passion According to St. Mark” is presented (Oct. 18-19).

Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico performs (Oct. 23).

Orquestra de Sao Paulo performs (Oct. 25).

Information: (949) 553-2422 or www.EclecticOrange.org.

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SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

Through March 9: “Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions.”

Information: (619) 232-7931.

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LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC

Esa-Pekka Salonen leads a program of Gabriela Ortiz’s “Concerto for Percussion” (world premiere), Revueltas, and Copland (Jan. 23, 25 and 26).

Salonen conducts John Adams’ “El Nino” (March 13, 15 and 16).

Information: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.org.

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Scott Timberg is a Times staff writer.