San Francisco Symphony Appoints Elim Chan as Music Director

The San Francisco Symphony has appointed Elim Chan as its new Music Director. The 39-year-old conductor born in Hong Kong has signed a six-year contract, the Symphony announced Thursday.

The appointment is a historic one. Chan will be the first woman to lead one of the so-called “Big 7” symphony orchestras in the United States, encompassing New York, Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Chan, most recently the principal conductor for the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Belgium, is lesser-known than her two predecessors in San Francisco: Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the orchestra for 25 years, and died earlier this month, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who stepped down in 2024.

As a conductor, Chan may best be described as outsized. Praised for her energy and rhythm, and noted for bringing precision and verve to nominally calm, languorous musical passages, Chan transcends her diminutive height. Often, she arcs forward, as if charging after the music. (Along with conducting, Chan has also trained on the side with a boxing coach.)

Speaking with the New York Times in 2024, the violinist Leila Josefowicz described Chan’s hands-on style with the orchestra: “She’s totally herself, which is really wonderful … She’s a very daring musician, and she’s going to try all kinds of things, all kinds of works, all kinds of different ways to make music.

Breaking a glass ceiling — and transcending labels

For many years, an open question has persisted of when major symphony orchestras would embrace women as music directors or full-time principal conductors. Despite high-profile figures like Marin Alsop and Nathalie Stutzmann, no woman had been appointed at one of the top seven U.S. orchestras until now.

In 2014, still in her 20s, Chan became the first woman to win the esteemed Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in England, bringing her global attention. Two years later, writing for The Guardian, she called for a de-emphasis on her gender.

“I have felt there to be at times an imbalance of focus on my gender over my whole identity as a musician. I do not want to be given any special treatment because I am a woman,” she wrote. “I am proud of being a woman conductor, but I want to take the next step and go beyond any tags and be seen and valued as the same as my male colleagues.

Chan has also received attention as an Asian, making the Bay Area a natural fit; the region is home to one of the highest percentages of Asian Americans in the continental United States. In the same Guardian piece, she expressed a regard for talent over ethnic identity.

“My core priorities have always been and will always be the music and the audience, and I think audiences over the past two years have come to see me simply as Elim, rather than under the labels ‘Asian’ or ‘female conductor.’”