Melange of Latin art, sounds

Tijuana’s Orquesta de Baja California returned to Southern California on Saturday night under the care of new (as of August 2004) music director Angel Romero -- best known as a distinguished member of the guitar-playing Romero family.

The locale was a large gallery within the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach -- not exactly your ideal music space. But the room was packed, and the program was an off-the-beaten-track melange that unapologetically crossed back and forth over the line between Latin popular and classical music.

The orchestra is chamber-sized, with ample percussion resources, able enough to surmount most demands, although the strings sounded a bit taxed in some of the thornier passages. Romero, who has been conducting regularly since 2000, seemed comfortable with the tricky rhythms that the repertoire often served up.

Silvestre Revueltas’ sarcasms, dissonances and fun-house contortions of Mexican popular music were amply represented with “Ocho por Radio” and “Alcancias,” and they were played carefully but with enough sass to get the points across.

A Mexican popular music hero of the past, Jose Alfredo Jimenez, was memorialized with three easy-listening-style arrangements of his songs for guitar and chamber orchestra by Alberto Nunez Palacio, the orchestra’s composer in residence. Palacio was also represented by his “Concierto del Sur a Norte,” loaded with pleasing tunes and some film-score-like textures. All the solo parts were meticulously handled by guitarist Roberto Limon.

The most stimulating piece was Leo Brouwer’s “Cancion de Gesta,” with an electrifying cadenza for tom-toms, mallet-struck congas and bongos and an echo of Handel’s “Water Music” out of nowhere. By contrast, the first performance of the chamber-orchestra version of Samuel Zyman’s “Fantasia on an Original Theme by Erik Zyman” (the composer’s then-6-year-old son) revealed a more sedate, neo-classical-tinged affair with an acerbic fugue at its center.