Celebrate summer with two free outdoor concerts for the whole community. Bring your friends, family, blankets, and picnic baskets for evenings of live music in the park.
Friday, July 24, 2026 — Shute Park — 6:30pm
Sunday, July 26, 2026 — Peninsula Park — 6:00pm
End time listed is approximate. Free admission. All are welcome.
CRUZAR LA CARA DE LA LUNA
A Mariachi Opera
Music by José “Pepe” Martínez
Lyrics by José “Pepe” Martínez and Leonard Foglia
Book by Leonard Foglia
Commissioned by Houston Grand Opera
Premiered at Houston Grand Opera in September, 2010
Orchestrated by David Hanlon
Orchestrations commissioned by Minnesota Opera
OPERA IN THE PARK Portland is proud to present the Oregon premiere of Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of The Moon), the world’s first mariachi opera. Since its premiere in 2010, this now-beloved work—a potent and inspiring portrait of a specific community and its specific experiences–has become a modern testament to opera’s eclectic and far-reaching range. The opera will be performed free to the public (another first for the work), in concert format, with full orchestra, chorus, and seven featured soloists.
Cruzar la Cara de la Luna tells a poignant and timely story of migration, cultural identity, and generational divides within the Mexican-American community. The story begins in present-day Texas where an elderly Laurentino Valesquez lies in his bed, on the brink of death. In conversation with his adult son, we learn that Laurentino left a wife and child in Mexico when he immigrated to the USA in search of opportunity. The borders of time and space blur as we meet three generations of the Valesquez family, and come to understand their journeys, physical and spiritual. With a bilingual libretto in Spanish and English, and an incandescent score that artfully fuses traditional opera with mariachi, the seventy-minute work invites audiences to examine their own ideas about home, belonging, and family, and to find the universal in the specific.
