MUSIC REVIEW : Symphony Breaks Culture Barrier : Orchestra: A long-overdue program of Mexican works was most welcome and often lively, despite the musicians’ obvious exhaustion.

This may be a border city, but San Diego’s major musical organizations have been slow to acknowledge the cultural traditions of Mexico and other Latin countries.

Only just recently, the San Diego Opera has included Spanish-language translations of opera plots in every program for its Spanish-speaking patrons.

And it took the San Diego Symphony until Sunday night to salute Mexican music and the local Mexican-American community. It called the Copley Symphony Hall concert “Fiesta Sinfonica.” Though these modest steps hardly indicate a complete conversion to born-again multiculturalism, they are as welcome as they are overdue.

Cuban-American conductor Odaline de la Martinez proved a wise choice to lead this program devoted to accessible Mexican music from the 1930s. As animated on the podium as the music’s pulsing dance rhythms, De la Martinez brought fervor and sympathetic insight to festive tone poems by Carlos Chavez, Silvestre Revueltas and Jose Pablo Moncayo. For the most part, her clearly defined baton technique kept the orchestra together through tricky changes of meter.

The orchestra needed more than a mere jolt of adrenaline, however. “Fiesta Sinfonica” was the third program the musicians prepared last week, and their sense of exhaustion surfaced more than once. The slow sections of Revueltas’ “La Noche de los Mayas,” a suite from an all-too-predictable film score, lacked focus, and the wistful violin solos drooped.

Notable offerings were Chavez’s classic “Sinfonia India,” with its phalanx of exotic percussion instruments, and Revueltas’ “Sensemaya,” a sophisticated essay of complex rhythms and dissonant iterations a la Stravinsky. Moncayo’s predictable “Huapango,” based on traditional Veracruz dances, and Blas Galindo’s “Sones de Mariachi” both belong to the picture-postcard school of nationalist composition. Either would have sufficed.

Argentine Alberto Ginastera, the only non-Mexican on the program, was represented by his “Estancia” Suite, another unadventurous movie score in which raucous dances alternated with bucolic tableaux.

Confirming the most banal stereotype of Mexican music, the Mariachi Real band played in the lobby before the concert. It also accompanied an earnest dance troupe from San Diego Memorial Junior High School in three short dances to open the concert’s second half.

Perhaps next time the “Fiesta Sinfonica” planners will be bold enough to dispense with the mariachis. And the conductor will include music from Mexico’s current generation of composers.