Elim Chan named first female music director of San Francisco Symphony

With Elim Chan, the San Francisco Symphony is betting that a historic first can also be a reset: who fills the seats, what reaches the program, and how the orchestra stays relevant in a city where women now lead the Symphony, Opera and Ballet.

Chan, 39, was born in Hong Kong and will begin immediately as Music Director Designate before officially taking over in September 2027. The Symphony said she will be its 13th music director in 115 years, with an initial six-year term. From the 2028-29 season on, she is expected to conduct at least 10 subscription weeks, plus Opening Week and three additional weeks for special projects such as touring and SoundBox.

Her first concerts as Music Director Designate are scheduled for June 5 and 6, 2026, in a program built around Wagner, Berlioz and Debussy, with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as soloist. Chan was already woven into the orchestra’s 2026-27 season plans, a sign that the Symphony wanted her in front of audiences well before the formal handoff. For a local institution still defining its post-Salonen identity, that early visibility matters as much as the appointment itself.

The Symphony spent two years searching for a successor to Esa-Pekka Salonen, who announced in March 2024 that he would leave after the 2024-25 season because he did not share the board’s goals for the institution. The orchestra later described his tenure as five years. Chan’s arrival now gives the Symphony a chance to reframe its pitch to San Francisco listeners, especially younger and more diverse audiences who may be less attached to old subscription habits than to fresh musical identity.

Priscilla B. Geeslin, chair of the Board of Governors, said, “San Francisco has always thrived on bold vision and reinvention, and in Elim Chan we have exactly the Music Director this moment calls for,” while chief executive officer Matthew Spivey called Chan “a musician of unusual gifts and a leader of equal substance.” The choice also lands in a wider cultural context: San Francisco Classical Voice noted that women now lead the city’s three major classical institutions, with Eun Sun Kim at San Francisco Opera and Tamara Rojo at San Francisco Ballet.

Chan’s résumé reaches well beyond San Francisco. She studied at Smith College in Massachusetts and the University of Michigan, won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in 2014 as its first female winner, served as assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2015-16 and a Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, then led the Antwerp Symphony from 2019 to 2024 and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra from 2018 to 2023. She also debuted at the BBC Proms in 2023 and returned for the First Night of the Proms in 2024. The Symphony’s own history records that Antonia Brico first conducted the orchestra in 1940, a reminder that this appointment is both a milestone and a test of how far San Francisco wants its flagship orchestra to change.