MUSIC

Starting next month--”as soon as possible,” spokeswoman Chris Bliss said over the weekend--the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra will take a cue from the Los Angeles and New York orchestras and provide cough drops to its patrons. “We hope this means the end of what I call the ‘barking seal syndrome,’ ” Bliss said. Bliss added that the symphony--just back from performing in New York, where the Philharmonic has offered cough drops since 1986--has already lined up a corporate sponsor, Walgreen Co., an Illinois-based chain of drug stores. And guess who the special guest soloist will be when the cough suppressants will probably make their debut, on Jan. 10? Humorist Garrison Keillor among whose sketches is a satire of audience etiquette in which a music-lover desperately struggles to suppress a tickle in his throat during the performance of a fictitious “Concerto for Cough and Orchestra.”