From Lucerne into the world

In late May, the San Francisco Symphony announced its Music Director Designate: Elim Chan will take the helm of the storied orchestra in 2027. The Hong Kong-born conductor will thus become the first woman to lead one of the major U.S. orchestras.

But did you know about Elim Chan's close ties to the Lucerne Festival?

At the Easter Festival 2015, Bernard Haitink selected the now 39-year-old for his Lucerne Festival conducting masterclass. There, Elim Chan gained valuable insights – and impressed the legendary Dutch maestro and festival organizers so much with her talent that she was immediately invited to join the main program the following year. And she did so in a special format: the first and, to date, only appearance by a conductor in the “Debut” series. At the podium of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, Elim Chan captivated audiences with music by Adams and Saariaho, as well as Bartók’s furious Concerto for Orchestra.

In the years that followed Elim Chan's Lucerne Festival debut, her career really took off: she was a “Dudamel Fellow” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and, starting in 2019, Music Director of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra. At the BBC Proms in 2024, she conducted the First Night with such great success that she was immediately entrusted with the legendary Last Night the following year.

In mid-May, shortly before her appointment as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, she returned to Lucerne: Víkingur Ólafsson had selected Elim Chan as the conductor for the closing concert of his new Pulse Festival. And she thrilled audiences at the podium of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra as a congenial partner in Bach’s Piano Concerto in F minor and Berg’s Violin Concerto (with Patricia Kopatchinskaja), as well as with a gripping performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

Now we look forward to the next Lucerne concert with Elim Chan: this summer, she returns to the Lucerne Festival Academy. Her concert on August 29 takes us to the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert with John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony, and to the edge of silence with the clarinet concerto über by composer-in-residence Mark Andre. And the world premiere of Liza Lim’s Tongue of the Land, a “Concerto for Orchestra with Carnyx,” breathes new life into a massive Iron Age war trumpet.