Fabio Mechetti

Conductor Fabio Mechetti made his combination debut and swan song as part of the San Diego Symphony's subscription series on Thursday night at Symphony Hall. The Brazilian-born conductor joined the local symphony staff last November as its resident conductor, but announced in mid-March that he would not return to San Diego after his duties were completed later this month.

Despite the San Diego Symphony's optimism about its 1988-89 season, which it will announce at a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, management continues to be plagued with unsettling turnover. On Friday, music administrator Edmundo Diaz del Campo resigned. His departure follows last month's resignation of resident conductor Fabio Mechetti and the replacement earlier in the season of hand-picked marketing director Jane Langdon.

To welcome back its San Diego audiences after a discordant 18-month hiatus, the San Diego Symphony management is conjuring a festive party mood. The welcoming amenities at tonight's and Saturday's symphony performances include balloons festooned outside the hall and roses presented to all the women in the audience.

Swathed in sequins and sporting outrageous chapeaux , chanteuse Carol Channing brought her routine to the San Diego Symphony Friday night. Saving her signature tunes, "Hello, Dolly" and "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend," for the program's finale, Channing ambled through half a dozen musical vignettes, each punctuated by a costume change in specially constructed booths at either edge of the Symphony Hall stage.

Carl St.Clair was the dark horse in the Pacific Symphony's two-year search for a music director. He arrived last in the series of six guest conductors seeking the baton of Orange County's most prestigious orchestra. Still, he trumped the competition and got the job in 1990. St.Clair will appear last again this weekend in the series of 12 guest conductors under consideration to take over the Utah Symphony when music director Joseph Silverstein retires in May. With its $8.

Gustav Mahler could procrastinate over a score and stretch its composition into years. But in writing his Eighth Symphony, which an early--and crass--promoter dubbed "The Symphony of a Thousand" since it requires massed and multiple ensembles, Mahler didn't dawdle. Michael Tilson Thomas, who conducts the mighty Eighth in Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night describes the composer's process: "He wrote it in a burst of energy, in only eight weeks."

The San Diego Symphony's new resident conductor grew up hearing music played poorly, and he vowed to do it right if he ever had the chance. "Growing up in Brazil and seeing the situation made a very strong mark on my personality and my responsibility to music," Fabio Mechetti said. The difference between making music here and Brazil is simple: money. In Brazil, the government underwrites the arts. Musicians are paid by the state, and concerts are free.

Murry Sidlin is a thinking person's conductor. He can articulate arguments of musical aesthetics with the same fervor and precision that he wields the baton at the podium. And he may be one of the few who is able to perceive similarities in the the problems facing baseball and the current crises of American symphony orchestras. This week Sidlin is conducting the San Diego Pops at Hospitality Point in its summer season finale.

A year ago, the San Diego Symphony musicians were picketing Symphony Hall, protesting the season's cancellation and their lockout by a management team that refused to let them work, except on its terms. The players stubbornly refused to give in. There followed a season of bitterness and disillusionment. Mistrust was so embedded that the two sides spoke barely a word to each other, carrying on negotiations in sessions where even civility was worn to the thinnest veneer.