Known for her electrifying presence, crystalline precision, and expressive energy, Elim Chan will become the Symphony’s 13th music director when she officially takes the podium in the 2027–28 season.
But San Francisco audiences don’t have to wait until then to see what all the excitement is about. Following sold-out appearances with the Orchestra in June, Chan returns to Davies Symphony Hall this October 29–31.
The October program has a little bit of everything: gorgeous melodies, dazzling violin, a full chorus, and a journey into some of music’s biggest questions.
French violinist Renaud Capuçon joins Chan and the Orchestra for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, a piece filled with soaring lyricism and the kind of virtuoso fireworks that make seeing it performed live especially thrilling. The San Francisco Symphony Chorus takes center stage, too, moving from the poignant beauty of Brahms’s Nänie to the luminous, bell-like soundscape of Arvo Pärt’s a cappella Magnificat.
(Courtesy of SF Symphony)
Then things get darker.
The evening culminates in John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony, drawn from his acclaimed opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the creation of the atomic bomb. Adams transforms that history and its questions of ambition, responsibility, and human consequence into music of enormous tension and orchestral power.
For Chan, the connections running through the evening are deeply human. Brahms confronts mortality and grief; Adams wrestles with humanity’s capacity for destruction. Between them are moments of stillness, beauty, and transcendence.
The result is the kind of night that shows just how much ground a live orchestra can cover: intimate one moment, explosive the next, with music that is beautiful, unsettling, exhilarating, and thought-provoking all at once.
If you haven’t been to Davies Symphony Hall lately, consider this your invitation to hear one of classical music’s most exciting conductors begin her next chapter in San Francisco.
// Elim Chan Conducts Adams and Mendelssohn, October 29–31at Davies Symphony Hall (tickets start at $45); 201 Van Ness Ave. (Civic Center), sfsymphony.org
