Around the Music Festival

The San Francisco Symphony has announced that it will appoint Hong Kong-British conductor Elim Chan (陳以琳) as its next music director. Her term will be six years, starting from the 2027/2028 season. The music director position had been vacant since Esa-Pekka Salonen stepped down in 2025.

Chan is 39 years old and was born in British Hong Kong. From a young age, she studied cello, piano, and choir, and graduated from United World College (UWC) in Hong Kong. After that, she went to Smith College, a prestigious women’s college in the United States, to study medicine, but changed her major to music midway through her studies and graduated there. She then pursued further studies at the University of Michigan.

Subsequently, she became the first female conductor to win the Donatella Frick European Conducting Competition, hosted by the London Symphony Orchestra, in 2014. From the 2019/2020 season, she succeeded Edo de Waart as principal conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Denmark, and retired at the end of the 2023/2024 season.

Her orchestral debut was January 2023, and she has two concerts scheduled for June 5th and 6th. Her husband is a Dutch percussionist and they live in Amsterdam.

PHOTO：Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra


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