The First Woman to Lead a Big 7 Orchestra

The most telling thing about Elim Chan's appointment isn't that it happened. It's that we're still calling it historic.

But let's start somewhere else. Let's start with the fact that it's good news. Genuinely, straightforwardly good. Chan is 39, she's been building one of the most serious conducting careers of her generation, and by every account - critics, musicians, audiences across three continents - something happens in the room when she stands in front of an orchestra. That's the thing you can't manufacture. You can train technique, you can develop repertoire, you can learn how to read a score until the ink disappears. What you can't teach is what makes an orchestra lean forward. Chan has it.

She won the Donatella Flick competition in 2014 - the first woman to do so - and has spent the years since building exactly the kind of career that earns a major appointment on merit: a serious tenure in Antwerp, the BBC Proms, repeat invitations from orchestras that don't give those out lightly. When she debuted in San Francisco in 2023 the reviews were specific about what they heard, which is usually the sign that something real happened. When she spoke after the appointment, the first thing she reached for was the generosity of the musicians. Not the platform, not the history. The players. That tells you where her attention lives.

The San Francisco Symphony is one of the seven American orchestras the industry simply calls the Big 7. Between them, more than a century of music directorships - and Chan is the first woman any of them has appointed. That fact doesn't require a speech. It sits there quietly and asks to be looked at. The structures that produce a music director search were built over generations, and they tend to reproduce themselves. That they produced something different this time is worth more than a press release.

She inherits an orchestra that has spent two years listening hard, weighing options, learning what it wants. Twenty-three guest conductors in one season alone. That kind of waiting tends to sharpen an ensemble. She arrives into attention, not indifference - which is, for a conductor, about the best possible condition in which to begin.

I find myself genuinely glad about this one. Not just for what it signals, but for what it is: a fine conductor and an orchestra that apparently recognised each other the moment they shared a room. The history will be written later. Right now there's just a podium, and the right person standing at it.

Photo: Elim Chan, Music Director Designate of the San Francisco Symphony. © Cody Pickens / San Francisco Symphony.