CULTURE WATCH : Road Show

“Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Dec. 29, is the centerpiece of a festival that in its scope is comparable only to the Olympic Arts Festival. Besides LACMA, a good dozen other museums and galleries have mounted related shows. And gallery art is just the beginning. Photography, film, music, cuisine and dance are all copiously represented.

Beauty may be its own excuse for being, but so much beauty, all from one place, all at once. . . . Rude though the question may seem, it has been asked: What’s the point of this fiesta?

For us, the point came unexpectedly home last Sunday afternoon in the Bing Theatre as the extraordinary guitar duo Roberta Limon and Jaime Marquez performed contemporary Mexican guitar music. The music was broadly in the European tradition: The closing work in the concert, “Preludio y Son” by Ernesto Garcia de Leon, has the density of a string quartet. And yet one would listen long in today’s Europe before hearing such a work. Similarly, composer Francisco Nunez’s pensive but kinetic “Ramificaciones” might be called a work for jazz guitar, but it owes little or nothing to jazz tradition from the north.

But just for these reasons this quiet, almost hidden moment seemed to say something crucial about the entire, sometimes overwhelming festival itself. Mexico has sent quite a show on the road, in other words, but the road does not define the show. Against the odds, Mexico is still singing her own, secret song, not for us but for herself. It’s our good luck to listen in.