A show of restraint for Cinco de Mayo
CULTURE MIX
Intimacy and restraint can be found, if you know where to look.
Not to sound elitist, but Cinco de Mayo can be a drag. The crowds, the heat, the cheap beer, bad sound and annoying DJs are enough to make you dread those massive outdoor festivals staged every year to celebrate the Mexican holiday.
To avoid the Cinco syndrome, here are a few offbeat alternatives offering more refined aspects of Mexican culture in more intimate settings. What better way to celebrate the defeat of the French than with good food, fine wine and sophisticated music, all with a Mexican twist?
Mexico is known more for its mariachis than its string quartets, but La Catrina comes to town next week to help change some assumptions about classical music.
"People come to us and say, 'Wow, I didn't realize there was all this interesting quartet music written by all these Mexican composers,' " says violinist Daniel Vega-Albela, who co-founded the ensemble in Mexico City in 2001. "Our main mission is to say, 'Look, there is this other repertoire for string quartet that is just as varied and just as interesting as the traditional one we tend to associate with string quartet music."
La Catrina is scheduled to perform next Saturday at Tamayo Restaurant in East Los Angeles as part of the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series sponsored by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary's College. The events are designed to take classical music out of the concert halls, promoting a multitiered appreciation of music, art and architecture in historic venues.
This is not the first time the series has chosen Tamayo as a showcase. The pioneering Cuarteto Latinoamericano appeared there two years ago in a program that spotlighted East L.A.'s historic Jewish sites. This time, concert-goers are offered a self-guided tour of Chicano murals.
The art theme is in keeping with the restaurant, named after Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, whose works are on display on the tall walls of the hacienda-style building that once housed the real estate offices of an old California land-grant family. In various incarnations it has been a DMV office, a sheriff's substation, a furniture store, even a coffeehouse run by the radical Brown Berets in the 1960s. "It's a wonderful environment," says Da Camera's director, Kelly Garrison. "The room itself is a resonant space with a wonderful ambience."
