Conductor Elim Chan has been named the new music director of the San Francisco Symphony.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
The San Francisco Symphony has named Elim Chan as its next music director, making the internationally acclaimed Hong Kong-born conductor the first woman to lead the orchestra in its 115-year history.
The appointment makes her only the third woman to lead a top-level American orchestra.
Chan, 39, is scheduled to begin a six-year contract with the orchestra in September 2027, replacing Esa-Pekka Salonen after a two-year search.
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“Every time I come here, there’s such passion and care in how the orchestra plays,” she told the Chronicle during a recent interview. “It’s very visceral from the first rehearsal. I can tap into it, and it just comes.”
Chan made her debut in Davies Symphony Hall in 2023, leading the Symphony in a world premiere by the American composer Elizabeth Ogonek, alongside music by Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. The sparks were immediate, and her two subsequent appearances only deepened her relationship with the orchestra.
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“The musicians are quick and professional, and they’re feisty,” she said. “They fight because they care about the music.”
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Elim Chan makes her debut at Davies Symphony Hall guest conducting the San Francisco Symphony in 2023. Chan has been named the new music director of the San Francisco Symphony.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
The admiration between her and the musicians seems to have been mutual.
“From her first week here, I thought she was just a phenomenal musician,” said violinist Jessie Fellows, a member of the search committee. “There are a lot of conductors, and many are similar to others. But her ideas are so original, and not just for the sake of being different.”
Symphony CEO Matthew Spivey said that Chan was always in contention for the post of music director, which became vacant in 2025 when Salonen declined to renew his contract after five years at the orchestra’s helm.
“Elim is the kind of conductor that sparks interest from the very beginning,” Spivey said. “From the very first performances, we recognized that there was something very special in this artist, and it’s been exciting to see that relationship grow and evolve over the time that she’s been here.”
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Chan’s contract calls for her to conduct 10 weeks beginning with the 2027-28 season, including the opening gala concert.
But San Francisco audiences won’t have to wait nearly that long to hear her in action. She’s slated to conduct the orchestra June 5-6, in music of Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Wagner and Debussy, and is scheduled to return Oct. 29-31, with a program featuring Symphony premieres of works by John Adams and Arvo Pärt.
Off the podium, Chan seems poised to win over the city as well as her future colleagues. A voluble conversationalist with a brisk, cheerful demeanor, she radiates intelligence and artistic commitment. She laughs often, even as she chooses her words with evident care.
Chan grew up in Hong Kong, the eldest of three children in a family that appreciated the arts but was not especially musical. She sang in a children’s choir and studied piano and cello, but the idea of pursuing a musical career was late to hatch.
As a freshman at Smith College, the women’s college in Northampton, Mass., she said she threw herself into every field, studying biology, Italian and even forensic science in case she wound up as a detective.
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Elim Chan in San Francisco on May 7. The internationally acclaimed Hong Kong-born conductor is the first woman who has been named to lead the San Francisco Symphony in its 115-year history.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
But the moment that cemented her fate came almost by chance, when she was singing in the collegiate choir and the conductor asked her to take over a rehearsal of Verdi’s “Requiem” so he could step into the hall and check the acoustical balances.
“That was my thunderbolt moment,” she recalled, “when everything just seemed to line up, and I knew that this was what I had to do. It was as if a voice said to me, ‘What are you running away from? What are you waiting for?’”
With a newfound sense of purpose, Chan devoted herself single-mindedly to conducting, graduating from Smith and going on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan.
While in Michigan, she won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, a prestigious biannual affair affiliated with the London Symphony Orchestra. She was the first woman to win the competition — and remains the only female winner to this day, she noted tartly.
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But the ambiguities of being a woman in such a male-dominated profession only dawned on her slowly, she said. The first conductors she encountered as a child, in her chamber chorus and in the education programs of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, were women.
“I always thought it was normal — up until the moment that I decided I wanted to do it professionally. Then the barriers went up. Even my mentors, because they cared for me, started to tell me, ‘Oh, this will be very difficult for you, Elim.’ Or, ‘Maybe you should be a choral conductor, that’s easier,’” she said.
“But it turned out that the difficulties were about people’s expectations about what a woman should do. And, even though I was scared, I thought, ‘Who says that’s what a woman is expected to do?’ And for that I have Smith College to thank.”
Chan said she has often faced resistance from orchestral musicians when they first meet her. She stands just over 5-foot-1, by her own account, and looks younger than her age, so musicians have a tendency not to take her completely seriously on first encounter.
“But then I say, ‘OK, let’s go,’ and the whispers stop,” she said, with a smile. “They start to say, ‘Oh, my God, she’s serious.’”
Conductor Elim Chan, 39, has been named the new music director of the San Francisco Symphony, replacing Esa-Pekka Salonen after a two-year search.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
The issue of first impressions has been important to her career, because so much of it has been devoted to guest conducting.
She spent one season as chief conductor of the Swedish opera company NorrlandsOperan before signing on as music director of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Belgium in 2019. But her first season was hobbled by the COVID-19 shutdown, and she left there in 2024, before her contract had expired.
In talking about her plans for San Francisco, Chan said she welcomed the opportunity to have the time and stability to develop a long-term commitment with the orchestra and the city.
“As fun as it is to jet-set and meet different orchestras, I keep going back to this idea when you had one conductor and one orchestra for a long time: MTT (Michael Tilson Thomas) and San Francisco. Eugene Ormandy and Philadelphia. George Szell and Cleveland,” she listed, acknowledging the late Thomas, who died in April. “That amount of focus, the singular vision, the building and nurturing of something that actually takes time to marinate and grow — I miss that.”
For Chan, conducting is inseparable from narrative and emotion.
“I love to tell a good story and to hear a good story,” she explained. “I think a lot of conducting is about being a good storyteller.”
As far as repertoire, she said she has a particular fondness for the Russian composers — Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and especially Rachmaninoff, who she believes has long been underappreciated.
Among living composers she has a special bond with Ogonek, whose beautiful tone poem “Moondog” she premiered in her first San Francisco appearance.
Conductor Elim Chan has been named the new music director of the San Francisco Symphony. She plans to relocate to the city when her six-year contract begins in September 2027.
Cody Pickens/San Francisco Symphony
Chan currently lives in Amsterdam with her husband, the Dutch percussionist Dominique Vleeshouwers. But she said that like Thomas before her, she does plan to take up residence in San Francisco, and has already begun scouting the city for a congenial neighborhood.
“San Francisco is a dream city. I love the presence of the big Asian community,” she said, adding that she loves the food and wine culture as well as the city’s close proximity to nature. “I love the way nature just weaves into the neighborhood.
“And there are echoes between Hong Kong, where I grew up, and San Francisco. They’re cities on the water, and the water is looking outward — to the horizon. I know that fate has brought me to the right place.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when the San Francisco Symphony music director position became vacant. Esa-Pekka Salonen concluded his contract in June 2025.
Joshua Kosman is the Chronicle’s classical music critic emeritus.