I can hear exasperated voices complaining, “Not another Messiah performance!” And still others asking, “Why do it in the spring, when Christmas is so far away?” This weekend, BachCollegium San Diego under the direction of Ruben Valenzuela delivered a stunning account of G. F. Handel’s seemingly inescapable oratorio in three locations around the County. I was able to hear Sunday’s (March 17) performance at First Presbyterian Church in downtown San Diego. But let me be clear—this was not just another thrown-together, hacked-up version of Messiah, some director’s concoction of movements his chorus could learn in time for the concert. Nor…

Like Bill Cosby’s 1980s sit-com Huxtable family, mariachi music in San Diego is “movin’ on up.” Saturday (March 16) at Civic Theatre, San Diego Opera mounted its production of the first mariachi opera, Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, by the director of Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, José Pepe Martínez. Using the idiom and instrumentation of traditional Mexican mariachi music and recounted in a series of flashbacks, Cruzar tells a story of the destruction of a close-knit Mexican family in rural Michoacán whose father, Laurentino Velasquéz, goes north to work in Texas to support his wife Renata and son Rafael. But…