Diemecke Has Baton, Will Travel : Music: Pacific Symphony joins the list of orchestras the globe-trotter has guest-led.

In the old days, one conducting post was enough. Then two posts became fashionable. Today, Enrique Diemecke is typical of a breed of baton wielders whose flights of fancy, soaring musical lines and spiritual excursions also earn them frequent-flyer miles: The guest conductor.

Last season, in addition to his posts as music director of both the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and the Flint Symphony Orchestra in Michigan, Diemecke led the St. Petersburg (Russia) Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Auckland Philharmonia and Orquestra de Gran Canaria, among others.

His guest stints this season include the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra and, this week, the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa.

“It’s a mystery how these careers develop,” said Diemecke, 37, in a phone interview from Flint. Guest assignments “seem to be a lot a matter of luck, and having the personality that someone happens to be looking for. There’s a great deal of word-of-mouth--musicians telling other musicians. In this case, I knew Carl St.Clair.”

Appropriately enough, St.Clair, the Pacific Symphony’s music director, has signed the globe-trotting Diemecke for yet another journey: a program entitled “Voyage to 2001.”

On Wednesday and Thursday at Orange County Performing Arts Center, concerts so christened will include “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 with soloist Benny Kim, and Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

The Strauss work was, of course, featured in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But how does the Mozart Violin Concerto tie in? (Hmm, voyage and violin both start with a V; so, for that matter, does Valkyrie . . . . )

“I think (the title is) only because of the Strauss,” Diemecke guessed.

The Mexican-born, Washington D.C.-trained Diemecke (which he pronounces dee-meck, with neither syllable accented) has curly blond hair and blue eyes. All seven of his siblings are involved in performing or teaching music. His cellist father was of Czechoslovakian and German descent, and his pianist mother’s ancestry is Spanish and French.

With that kind of heritage, and with conducting experience from Irvine to Shanghai, he seemed a natural to field the age-old question: Do orchestras perform music of their own countries best?

“Music should be universal,” Diemecke said. “There is no reason the Berlin Philharmonic should not play the huapanga. “ Huapanga is a Mexican rhythm, curiously enough a forerunner of the chaconne. “But huapanga is a style that has not been taught at (European) conservatories. You learn huapanga by being around it.”

So Latin American orchestras are presumably best equipped to play huapanga, and by the same token, the Vienna Philharmonic to play waltzes?

“Unfortunately, the Austrian does not come to study in Mexico,” Diemecke said. “We do go to study in Austria.”

As for Diemecke, he studied violin with Henryk Szeryng and conducting with Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Maurice Abravanel and Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School for Advanced Conductors in Maine, on a scholarship granted by Madame Pierre Monteux. He’s also played French horn since he was 9.

He said he absorbed different lessons from each of his teachers, all valuable. But he said that there’s one aspect of music making that all stressed: The focus should not be on career at all.

“One needs to live the moment of producing music as if you were doing it the first time--or the last time,” he said. “You do it with passion and love for the music. Whether you make money out of it, whether you become famous . . . is secondary, if not completely irrelevant.

“But even the idea of security doesn’t have to damage (the integrity of your music making). In Los Angeles now, for instance, you see with the fires that there is nothing secure. You have to think in those terms. That this is my best opportunity to make music-- now. Because you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Or even in 10 minutes.”

* Guest conductor Enrique Diemecke leads the Pacific Symphony in works by Wagner, Mozart and Richard Strauss on Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $14-$39. Concert preview at 7 p.m. Live broadcast Thursday on KUSC-FM (91.5). (714) 740-2000.