Elim Chan and Sasha Cooke
Photo: Stefan Cohen, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony
June, 2026
Back in January, 2026, when Elim Chan's June concerts with San Francisco Symphony were announced, I jumped to the conclusion that this meant Chan would be the next music director of the orchestra. I was right, as it turned out, but in an article in the South China Morning Post, Chan herself says that SFS only approached her in February. She is a good source – obviously – so in January and before, maybe they were trying to figure out how and when to approach her and the concerts were to give the conductor an opportunity to appear with the orchestra as music director designate if they reached an agreement with her.
Anyway, I was at the second of the two concerts, on Saturday, June 6.
The concert was an occasion, and a heartening one after the last two years. Chan received standing ovations at the start and end. She likes to talk to the audience and she's genuinely funny and charming, which MTT was and Salonen wasn't, though he had a wry sense of humor. I think she will connect well with the audience and the city, again, an area where MTT was great and Salonen (a great conductor) wasn't.
As a concert, it was all solid and well played, with nothing revelatory about Chan as a conductor or about the music.
San Francisco has two first-class orchestras performing across the street from each other, and one plays a lot more Wagner than the other.* The SF Opera Orchestra has his music in their bones and ears a lot more than SFS. So the Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde was correct, but not idiomatic, though the last phrase before the pizzicato of death at the end of the Prelude stood out for its gorgeous phrasing. Overall, it had insufficient rubato and portamento and just did not flow the way it would have in the hands of the SFOO.
(I have fond memories of Salonen's bleeding chunks as a guest conductor during the centennial season, on a program where the real highlight was his violin concerto. I can't recall whether I have
heard Wagner at SFS since. I had hoped Salonen would do Tristan in concert, but...)
I don't have strong opinions about Debussy's La Mer; I haven't studied the score and somehow it doesn't stick when I hear it in concert or on record. I do not have strong opinions about the range of possibilities in the piece. I would have given Mark Inouye a solo bow for knifelike playing in the third movement and was surprised that Chan didn't. Well, she waded right into the orchestra to shake hands and give solo bows, and the trumpet section is pretty far from the podium!
Berlioz's song cycle Les Nuits d'été was the concert's highlight for me. Sasha Cooke is so good! She sang absolutely immaculately, though she didn't move me the way she did in Mahler 2 last year. I felt there were points where she could have raised the emotional temperature for greater impact. Chan had the orchestra sounding particularly great in the Berlioz, a composer she adores.
Various people, myself included, noticed that the originally-announced Mendelssohn Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream had disappeared from the program; in the event, it was to make way for an encore, one of Michael Tilson Thomas's Rilke songs. Cooke sang it beautifully – of course – and it was a lovely connection to the orchestra's past and to the man who did so much to make it what it is today.
Elsewhere:
- Steven Winn, SFCV and SF Chronicle
- Gabe Meline, KQED
- Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
* Robert Ward, retired principal horn of SFS, told me that he regretted that he hadn't played more opera, "especially Wagner." I can report that Jonathan Ring and Bruce Roberts did play one Ring with SFO, presumably either 2011 or 2018, under Donald Runnicles.
