San Francisco Symphony Music Director Designate Elim Chan has begun her tenure with joy, love, and, not surprisingly, great sounds.
Her introductory, sold-out concert on Friday night in Davies Hall featuring music by Wagner, Berlioz and Debussy was nothing short of a love fest.
“I’m thrilled to be here in my new home and with my new musical family,” the Hong Kong-born Chan, 39, said at the performance’s outset. Upon receiving her first standing ovation after the opening piece, Rchard Wagner’s romantic Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und “Isolde,” she flashed a heart with her hands, and said, “Thank you filling up every seat in this hall tonight. Thank you for showing up for your wonderful San Francisco Symphony.”
Later, gleefully describing how her first official appearance in her new post is a program packed with sounds of love, nature, transformation and transcendence, she added, “We should all do a big hug.”
In what she said was her 68th appearance with the symphony, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke gorgeously captured the range of moods from joy to anguish in Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été,” a six-song cycle set to poems by Théophile Gautier. She followed with a particularly personal and meaningful encore: “Ich lebe mein Leben” from “Meditations on Rilke” by her good friend, the late Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra’s former beloved music director for 25 years.
“It feels as if MTT is passing the baton to Elim,” Cooke said.
Chan, who was named the symphony’s 13th director in May, and is the first woman in the position, said while she never worked with MTT, she remembered seeing him in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a “cool” American Mavericks program with Jessye Norman.
Claude Debussy’s “La Mer,” the heart of the program in the second half, Chan said, was selected because its water theme connects so well with San Francisco, being the city by the bay, and her hometown Hong Kong. Following the performance, she called on individual musicians to stand and take a bow, and distributed flowers from the big bouquet she received to various orchestra members.
She closed, telling the cheering, standing audience, “I don’t want any barriers between you and us” before saying she’ll be back in October and inviting them to the big post-concert street party outside the hall.