Music / “Viva Mexico”, Victor Valdes. At the Street Theatre, September 23. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

HARP player and singer Victor Valdes has lived in Australia for the past 25 years and has become well known as a performer of Mexican music.

He has appeared with The Wiggles and at many of the major music festivals around Australia as a soloist or with a trio. His big mariachi band is an occasional project and it was a total delight to spend a couple of hours in a Street Theatre full of enthusiastic Mexicans listening to live and loud mariachi music.

Mariachi music is a Mexican musical genre that encompasses a range of song types with a
distinctive instrumental line-up and presentation. In Mexico, its origins go back to the 18th
century, with regional variations and the presentation style can seem quite stylised, with
matching tight costumes and very large sombreros.

Trumpets and violins are the usual lead instruments with the rhythm from a large bass guitar, the guitarron, and a small high-pitched guitar, the vihuela.

The band for this tour Valdes singing and playing harp, a violinist, piano accordion, three

trumpets, guitarron, vihuela and drums as well as another vocalist, a young woman from
Columbia named Lorena, with a confidant contralto, and three dancers.

Valdes is an assured baritone with three others in the band singing harmonies. With nine musicians on stage this is a big sound, with carefully worked out arrangements and programming keeping the concert moving along.

At least half the songs (and there were close on 30 performed during the concert) were known by the audience who enthusiastically sang along.

It is a style of music for which there is no cultural equivalent in Australia. I can’t imagine a room
of 250 Australians having a common musical repertoire in the way this group of (mostly)
expatriate Mexicans did, relishing a popular music with roots firmly in folk traditions which is
intrinsically Mexican.

It is a music of joy and passion, which had this reviewer leaving the theatre with a big smile.