When I meet Elim Chan, she’s come off a long-haul flight from Los Angeles following a stint conducting the LA Philharmonic. Fuelled by coffee, she is powering through, busy preparing for her return to the London Symphony Orchestra, a programme concluding with one of her signature pieces, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. Formerly the Chief Conductor of the Antwerp Symphony, Chan is enjoying freelancing but, as she reveals later, would dearly love the opportunity to lead another orchestra.
Chan doesn’t come from a musical background. “Hong Kong is maybe not an obvious birthplace for a classical musician,” she begins. “I’m sort of the odd one out in my family, although my father is an artist and always played music in his studio. Maybe my artistic genes come from him: I hold the baton, he holds the paintbrush!”
Her parents were open to seeing what she liked – piano lessons, children’s choir, ballet – without forcing her in any one direction. The musical epiphany came via a certain cartoon mouse. “I was fascinated by the original Disney Fantasia,” she begins. “I always thought that a conductor is a magician, exactly like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Leopold Stokowski in silhouette and Mickey Mouse running up to him. That was me!”
Significantly, the first concert she attended – a Hong Kong Philharmonic schools concert – was conducted by a woman, Yip Wing-sie. “She completely embodied what I saw in Fantasia. Of course, for me there was nothing unusual that the conductor was a woman… until people told me that it wasn’t usual. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be where she was, but of course, I had no idea how to get there.”
With her high school choir, Chan got her first taste of conducting “I took them to a competition – we even won!” – but it never occurred to her to make it a career. “I always loved sciences. I wanted to be a detective. I trained in psychology at Smith College in Massachusetts. That was my focus.
“I joined the choir there and the conductor invited me to become his assistant ‘because you have good ears’. Next, he told me, ‘You should conduct a piece at the concert.’ Fine. I’d done that before. And then the music department asked, ‘Elim, are you sure you don’t want to do music?’
“Then, it started to knock on the door louder and louder. The big thunderbolt moment was Verdi’s Requiem.” Asked to take over a rehearsal so the conductor could go and check balances, she launched into the Dies irae. “That bass drum strike was like the voice of God, as if destiny was asking me, ‘What are you waiting for? Are you stupid? What are you scared of?’”
Jump to December 2014 and Chan won the Donatella Flick, the first woman to win a major conducting competition – “my Cinderella moment” – which led to her working with the LSO. She assisted Chief Conductor Valery Gergiev who was not exactly noted for his guaranteed attendance in rehearsals.
“My first LSO assignment, I kid you not, was at the BBC Proms: all five Prokofiev piano concertos, featuring Alexei Volodin, Sergei Babayan and Daniil Trifonov. And of course little Elim at that point was like, ‘Wait, he wrote five?!’ The orchestra was quite freaked out because they needed to rehearse Four and Five, which they didn’t really know. The next thing Kathryn McDowell [MD] said, ‘Well, Valery is not here, you are rehearsing Four and Five!’”
Chan essentially rehearsed the whole concert, even called to be on stand-by at the Royal Albert Hall in case Gergiev didn’t appear. Was there a part of her hoping he wouldn’t show up? Chan grins mischievously. “A little teeny tiny bit!”
On her next assignment, Gergiev got to see Chan rehearsing the orchestra, and was duly impressed because it quickly led to her taking his Mariinsky Orchestra on tour to Mexico. A real feather in her cap, but as Chan admits, a “baptism by fire” with programmes featuring Rachmaninov 2 and Shostakovich 5.
Having seen her conduct excellent performances of Scheherazade, Shostakovich 10 and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, I’ve long suspected that Chan has a thing for big Russian repertoire. “How can I not if this was my beginning?” she laughs. “I love the drama. I love the theatre. I love the emotions. I have to say, I just cannot surpass Valery’s Sacre. I’ve sort of resurrected it because I was really scared of it.” Does Le Sacre du printemps still pose challenges today for orchestras who can practically play it in their sleep? “I think maybe the technical mastery of the instrument is sometimes a blockage,” she replies, “because I rather miss this tension and fear in the musicians themselves, thinking, this is freaking scary.”
She’s currently preparing her own suite from Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella, “which I just adore”, but admits that “my big love is really Rachmaninov”. The following day I watch her rehearsing the LSO in the Symphonic Dances, and note her sharp ear for detail. Sometimes she’ll raise half an eyebrow when trying to hush the strings, or twist her baton like a dagger – “It needs to hurt a bit here!”
How does Chan prepare for rehearsals, especially when conducting an orchestra for the first time? “You can plan all you want, but it can block you from reacting to what you actually have in front of you. My obsession now is how to be fresh in every concert, even in every rehearsal. We need to be on the edge of our seats a little bit.”
Last autumn saw her jump in for an indisposed Semyon Bychkov with the Czech Philharmonic and Chan notes, with wry amusement, how they were stumped at how they should react facing a diminutive, female, Asian conductor. “They were bowing towards me or doing a lot of these Asian customs, ultra-polite. ‘You don’t need to do this. I’m not Japanese. I’m just Elim!’ I think they’re used to a different kind of leadership. I would never be able to do what Bychkov does. It would be very unnatural. I think it would be hilarious!”
Chan certainly makes an impression on the podium, often wearing her trademark tulle skirt, blazer and boots. It wasn’t by design. “I had to face this question of what do women conductors wear? I mean, Marin Alsop and Susanna Malkki have the suit, the short hair – I tried that and still people had lots to say. Earrings or no earrings? But we’ve arrived at a time now where I think there’s this new definition of female leadership or what it means to be a woman. After people like Marin, who fought through much more difficult times, I can now afford to think about, what if I don’t wear a suit? What if I don’t wear a jacket? I will never be like a man, so why dress like one, trying to make my shoulders broader?” Power shoulder pads, I suggest, are very 80s. “Exactly!” she exclaims. “And I looked ridiculous. Plus the fact that I’m also petite. So I just started experimenting, through trial and error, and this is where I ended up!”
In 2019, Chan wound up in Belgium, as Principal Conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra. “My first job. A huge learning curve,” she reflects. “It came at a time when the world shut down. It’s very poignant looking back because one of the last things I did with the orchestra before Covid stopped everything was a Baltic tour, and the last stop was St Petersburg. That was the last time I was in Russia.”
What did her tenure teach her about herself? “In those five years, I grew exponentially. I was pushed to confront a lot of things, but there's no better way to grow. I basically confronted the question, what does it mean to be a leader? Especially with my personality, who doesn't want to be liked? But in a job like this, you need to make decisions that are not always nice. Sometimes, when you're the chief, you have to get your hands dirty.”
Recent highlights – “it felt like hitting the jackpot” – include conducting the First Night (2024) and the Last Night (2025) of the BBC Proms. She navigated the raucous Last Night crowd (and a busy guest list), striking the right tone in not one, but two speeches, which Chan penned herself. “I wasn’t going to be a mouthpiece. I needed to say something that I believed in.”
Chan has built up an impressive portfolio of American orchestras that she guest conducts, recently making her subscription concert debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Their strings are just so rich,” she waxes. “It's in their DNA, especially in Romantic repertoire like Rachmaninov, of course.”
The Cleveland Orchestra is a familiar collaborator, often regarded as the most European sounding of US orchestras. “I see it as a perfect sort of combination of the European and American worlds,” Chan explains. “It's a machine, but so well oiled and elegant. Yet they can pull out this steel. It's crazy how they have this sort of precision.
“Both of them [Philly and TCO] have this illuminated history with famed music directors and recordings. I won't use the word ego, but they have this collective musical pride. It's actually very humbling in a strange way because they always want to be better, they want to be challenged. In that sense, if you’re a conductor who has ideas, oh my God, you're in Disneyland!”
Of the US big hitters, Chan’s also conducted the Boston Symphony, praising its “beautiful, old-style hall”, the San Francisco, Chicago and Pittsburgh Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, relishing the “huge upgrade” to its Geffen Hall home. But the orchestra Chan has the longest relationship with Stateside is the LA Phil, after she became a Dudamel Fellow back in 2016. She praises their programming and approach to new music. “They can definitely boast that they are the most forward-looking. They have this Green Umbrella series which I did just now. I've never seen any orchestra that can sustain such an exciting and welcoming new music series. It's well attended. Their audience wants to be challenged. John Adams, who curates, and Esa-Pekka Salonen are always looking out for new, young voices who need a platform.
“The LA Phil is an orchestra that is very quick to adapt to different styles. Maybe they don't have the distinctive sound that we talk about with Cleveland or Philadelphia. I don't want to compare them with the LSO, but there's a similar versatile spirit: now we're doing a film soundtrack recording, now we're doing some John Adams, now Mahler 4. And of course, Disney Hall has become an iconic symbol of the city.” I ask what the sound is like in there. “It’s how you’d describe LA too: very bright, maybe a bit metallic.”
Several of those US orchestras currently have a conductor vacancy, or will have very soon. After Antwerp, would Chan want to take on another orchestra in a leadership position?
“During Covid, there was no audience and we all started recording and streaming. I remember asking the question, are we turning into some sort of music production company? Sure, we can play like that, but I don’t want to walk into a concert and listen to something played perfectly but where you don’t feel anything, or where orchestras all sound the same – everywhere.
“I do want an orchestra again because, despite this whole jet-setting and guesting, which I love, I just feel that – maybe in a way I’m old fashioned – I would love to go back to a time when we talk about Eugene Ormandy and Philadelphia or George Szell and Cleveland. I want to have a place. To just maybe go against the grind and really spend time, get to know each person’s name, like Leonard Bernstein did. When people talk about Bernstein they know he cared for them. And to work on something like an orchestra’s sound, like Ivan Fisher and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who have this real synergy.”
In decades to come we’ll hopefully be waxing lyrical about the sound of Chan and X. But where, only time will tell.
