Elim Chan, Music Director Designate of the San Francisco Symphony

Elim Chan

Cody Pickens, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

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Big news from Davies Symphony Hall this morning: Elim Chan, 39, will be the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony. She joins the orchestra immediately with the title Music Director Designate, and will become Music Director with the 2027-28 season.

Chan has conducted SFS three times, most recently in a program of excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Previously, she led works of Britten, Holst, Ogonek, Prokofiev, and more Tchaikovsky.

On June 5 and 6, she's leading this program, which I expect will be gorgeous:

• Felix Mendelssohn, Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  
• Hector Berlioz, Les Nuits d'été,  with Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
• Richard Wagner, Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
  
• Claude Debussy, La Mer

Get your tickets right now, because there will be a run on them any second. 

Chan will be the 13th music director of SFS, joining a lineage that includes such luminaries as Pierre Monteux, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her initial contract is for six years.

SFS will be by far the biggest-budget U.S. orchestra to have a woman as music director. Current female music directors elsewhere include Xian Zhang at the Seattle Symphony, JoAnn Falletta at the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Carolyn Kuan, who conducted The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera last fall, at the Hartford Symphony. Just across the street from Davies, Eun Sun Kim is the music director of San Francisco Opera.

The press release has these details:

In September 2027, Elim Chan begins her tenure as Music Director, leading the Orchestra in a minimum of 10 weeks of programming, including the Opening Gala and All San Francisco concert. From the 2028–29 season onward, she will conduct a minimum of 10 subscription weeks, as well as Opening Week, with an additional three weeks devoted to special projects such as touring and SoundBox.

A while back, Joshua Kosman wrote this in a review:

At intermission, a well-connected observer whispered unconfirmed rumors in my ear, which I unapologetically pass along, about the strong bond that’s been forming in recent years between Chan and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Philharmonic will need a new music director by 2026, when Gustavo Dudamel pulls up stakes and decamps to lead the New York Philharmonic.

Make of that scuttlebutt what you will, if anything. But Thursday’s triumph suggested that the orchestra could do worse — and that Chan’s next appearance in San Francisco is something to look forward to with unreserved excitement. 

Let's double and redouble that, now that Chan will be the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony.