Elim Chan will lead the San Francisco Symphony in a historic first

That sound of breaking glass? It’s Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan, 39, shattering a particularly stubborn ceiling after being named the first woman to lead the San Francisco Symphony in its 115-year history. Her title is currently Music Director Designate, and when she officially steps into the job of music director in September 2027, she will become the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.

Chan arrives as the orchestra’s 13th music director at a precarious moment for the organization, which in 2024 was rocked by the resignation of its last music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who declined to renew his contract after five years and said he didn’t share the same vision as the orchestra’s board of governors. Like many arts organizations, the symphony is still struggling with a pandemic-precipitated drop in attendance and a shrinking budget.

Fans will get their first chance to see Chan in action on June 5 and 6 when she’ll take the stage in a program including Richard Wagner’s Prelude from “Tristan und Isolde,” Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été” wih mezzo-soprano soloist Sasha Cooke, and Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.”

“In Elim Chan, we have found a musician of unusual gifts and a leader of equal substance — a rare combination, and the one behind her remarkable international rise,” said San Francisco Symphony Chief Executive Matthew Spivey in a news release. “What sets her apart on the podium is the conviction she brings to the music itself. Works orchestras have played a hundred times sound newly made under her hand, lit by a feeling for structure, color, and emotional architecture that audiences hear before they can name.”

Chan studied piano and cello in Hong Kong before moving to the U.S. to attend Smith College. She went to graduate school at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she ultimately earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 2015. The year before that she became the first woman to win the prestigious Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition, and was named assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Chan made her conducting debut with SF Symphony in January 2023 and has conducted the orchestra twice since. A rep for the the group said the feedback they’ve received from “our Orchestra, press, our audiences, and donors has been remarkable.” Chan is, indeed, a electrifying presence to behold onstage, a fact that no doubt played a major role in the search committee’s decision.

And now audiences get to delight in her fresh, invigorating approach to the conductor’s podium. Glass ceilings should be broken more often.

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt rooting for something new and different. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Limonade Tous les Jours: A Paris Love Story
Romance in the City of Lights from Obie Award-winning playwright Charles L. Mee, in which a young chanteuse and a reserved American in his 50s ponder amour amid classic French cabaret songs.
8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays, through June 28. City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building T1, Santa Monica. citygarage.org

Three Lives
Written, directed by and starring Alex Xander Luu, this solo theater performance shares the dramatic, sometimes humorous, story of the Luu family’s escape from Saigon in 1975 through the perspectives of a father, son and grandson.
8 p.m. Friday-Saturday; 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org

Tiny Furniture
Multi-hyphenate Lena Dunham’s breakout 2010 indie feature about a new college graduate adrift in New York City screens with “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a The Crackcident,” an episode from Dunham’s series “Girls.”
7:30 p.m. Friday; 6 p.m. Saturday. The Eastwood (Oxford Underground), 1089 N Oxford Ave. eastwoodpac.stagey.net

SATURDAY

Darkness and Humanity: The Complete Akira Kurosawa
The series continues with 35 mm screenings of “Ran,” the filmmaker’s 1985 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” transported to 16th century Japan; and “Kagemusha,” a 1980 feudal epic executive produced by George Lucas that helped revive Kurosawa’s career and cement his legacy.
“Ran,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday; “Kagemusha,” 6:30 p.m. Sunday. 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind
The first solo museum exhibition in Southern California of the singular artist, musician and activist, organized in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, includes work from her seven-decade career; direct participation by visitors will be invited in many of Ono’s transformational works.
Through Oct. 11. The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. thebroad.org

Kyungmi Shin
The L.A.-based artist will discuss her work, including the current exhibition “My Fantasy’s Burdens,” with Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor Arts Center and co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative at Stanford University. “My Fantasy’s Burden” includes both paintings and ceramics by Shin, featuring the artist’s practice of interrogating the Asian American diasporic identity, focusing on the cultural, economic and scientific consequences of colonialism.
4 p.m. Saturday; the exhibition concludes May 30. Perrotin Los Angeles, 5036 W Pico Blvd. perrotin.com

SUNDAY
Bob Dylan double feature
It’s the music icon’s 85th birthday and what better way to celebrate than with screenings of his 2021 concert film “Shadow Kingdom,” directed by Alma Har’el, and the 1987 musical melodrama “Hearts Of Fire” — one of Dylan’s forays into acting — directed by Richard Marquand.
7:30 p.m. Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica. americancinematheque.com

An Evening With Stephen Schwartz
Katharine McPhee, Joey McIntyre, Loren Allred and other performers join the celebrated composer-lyricist for a benefit concert to help the Altadena Music Theatre recover from the Eaton fire. Schwartz has won three Oscars, three Grammys, four Drama Desk Awards, a Golden Globe and the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theater, in addition to six Tony nominations for shows including “Wicked,” “Pippin” and “Godspell.” Preceded by a VIP cocktail hour.
7:30 p.m. Manoukian Cultural Performing Arts Center, 2495 E. Mountain St., Pasadena. altadenamusictheatre.com

Arts anywhere

New and recent releases of arts-related media.

An Evening with Nicole Scherzinger

The lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls crowned her triumphant, Olivier- and Tony-winning turn as Norma Desmond in the musical revival of “Sunset Boulevard” with a series of solo concerts at prestigious venues (including Walt Disney Concert Hall). The latest edition of “Great Performances” captured Scherzinger’s performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall in October 2025, when she sang showtunes, covers and songs from her own repertoire. 9 p.m. Friday on PBS and streaming on the PBS app

Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration

In this visual chronicle, D.B. Dowd, a professor of design and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, follows this unique art form from relief prints and woodcuts in ancient China and Japan, through the development of the printing press in 15th century Europe, and on to modern developments such as illustrated news, recreational reading and ad-driven consumer culture. Dowd reconsiders the traditional narrative to view illustration in the context of race, gender, literacy and cultural memory. The book examines the integration of reading and looking, the increasing prevalence of images in the digital age, and what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Princeton University Press: 400 pages, $60

— Kevin Crust

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Theater lovers rejoice: “Brigadoon” at the Pasadena Playhouse may be the “best local staging of a musical” Times theater critic Charles McNulty has seen in 20 years covering the scene for The Times. The revival, directed by Katie Spelman with an updated book by playwright Alexandra Silber, is “the high-water mark so far of Pasadena Playhouse producing artistic director Danny Feldman’s ongoing reexamination of the American musical canon,” McNulty writes. In the same column, McNulty notes that another classic musical revival, “Flower Drum Song” at East West Players, does not hit its mark.

The Skirball Cultural Center‘s latest exhibit takes on the genesis of Punk rock in the 1970s, and traces its rise from the UK to New York and Los Angeles. The exhibit, “Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976-86,” pegs punk’s year zero to 1976, “when the Ramones debuted their self-titled record. That same year, the Sex Pistols cursed on live TV, John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil co-founded Punk magazine, and the Damned released the first British punk single, ‘New Rose’.”

As the world celebrates the centennial of jazz legend Miles Davis, a unique photo show is happening at Musichead Gallery on Sunset Boulevard. “The show celebrates the late jazz musician’s centennial through imagery captured over a career spanning nearly five decades,” writes staff writer Julius Miller, noting that some of those photos have not even been seen by members of the Davis family.

Times classical music critic Mark Swed sat down for an exclusive interview with Los Angeles Philharmonic Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel as he readied to play his final shows with the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall before departing for the New York Philharmonic. “I’m living here and I’m not living here,” Dudamel told Swed. “The connection will always be here.”

Swed also weighed in on two performances marking composer Philip Glass’ 90th birthday (which arrives at the end of January): Paris Opera’s “shocking” new “noir” production of Glass’ “Satyagraha”; and a UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures-commissioned show called “Philip Glass and the Poets,” which premiered at Campbell Hall featuring readings by performance artist Taylor Mac and dancer/choreographer Lucinda Childs.

The Times got an exclusive first look inside the soon-to-open Hospital of Emotions, which features 70 artists in a takeover of 80 rooms at the shuttered St. Vincent’s Medical Center on the outskirts of downtown L.A. The sprawling immersive art project is divided into various departments including joy, fear and sadness, and shines a spotlight on wellness and mental health.

Meow Wolf L.A. won’t open until later this year, but The Times got an early look at a new character that will be featured in the immersive art space. Its name is WoWoW and it’s the creation of the experimental video art collective Everything Is Terrible. Read all about the “20-foot-tall, 1,000-pound amoeba-like creature” here.

Barnsdall Friday Wine Nights are returning for a 17th year. The event is set to begin May 29 and run through Sept. 11, every Friday evening from 5:30 to 9:00 p.m. Located on the West Lawn of Frank Lloyd Wright’s magnificent Hollyhock House, the gathering occupies one of the city’s most magical outdoor spots. A $55 general admission ticket gets you four glasses of wine from Silverlake Wine, along with a rotating lineup of food trucks. DJs also regularly perform throughout the series. Best of all: Proceeds support arts programming and preservation at Barnsdall Art Park. A rep for the event notes that, “this year’s fundraiser is especially critical amid proposed budget and staffing cuts to the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.”

Break out your best picnic basket and blanket: Independent Shakespeare Co. has announced this summer’s Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival, which runs outdoors every year at the park’s Old Zoo. This year’s lineup includes the Bard’s “Coriolanus” and “The Comedy of Errors.” Performances are free, but registration is requested at www.IndieShakes.org.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Times restaurant critic Bill Addison declares the 10-table Wilde’s the new “crown jewel” of Los Feliz.