Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, June 5, 2026 — An exciting night at the San Francisco Symphony: the Music Director Designate, Elim Chan, conducts the SF Symphony and the audience went wild. While the music was gorgeous, all 2700 people in Davies Hall were thrilled. Our Music Director Designate has performed here previously. Her debut at the San Francisco Symphony was in January, 2023. She will begin her SFS Music Director-ship in October, 2027.
Her conducting matches power and gentleness; it explains these styles depending entirely on the music. Elim Chan is the partner with the composers. It is all about her sense of the music. The concert June 5 opened with Richard Wagner’s The Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde (1859). The music is lush, searching to reach the love of the two who are trapped. Tristan has been wounded. Isolde could not arrive in time to heal his wounds. The music becomes the wash of sea water and the lovers’ desires. The SF Symphony made the beauty, painful loss, and delicate feelings. It was wonderful music that created a story that became felt real.
San Francisco Symphony with Music Director Designate and Conductor Elim Chan, and Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-soprano, in a performance of Richard Wagner’s “Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde,” Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été,” and Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.” At Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday night, June 5, 2026.
Les Nuits d’ete (1840-41, orch. 1843-56) (The Nights of Summer) by Hector Berlioz is an enigmatic creation. Berlioz had fallen in love with with an Irish actress who could not speak French. They lived together, but the relationship did not work out. The emotion of Theophile Gautier’s poems may be leaving love as the love of Tristan and Isolde. Those two were bound to a dreadful end. Their love is continual and lost. Les Nuits d’ete poems also have lost love behind the curtain. Sasha Cooke sang so well. She and Elim Chan were hand in glove. She conveyed the sentiment of the poems which often begin with love and then recognizes that death will interfere. In the poem, The Specter of the Rose, “I was meant to be envied,/And for a fate so beautiful/Many would give their lives.” Berlioz was a composer who also loved great literature, especially Shakespeare. These Gautier poems dive into a love relationship that is not satisfied, not happily allowed out of it and not happily to lose it. In Absence, he says: “Oh, bitter fate! Oh, cruel absence!/Oh, great desires unsatisfied!”
San Francisco Symphony with Music Director Designate and Conductor Elim Chan, and Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-soprano, in a performance of Richard Wagner’s “Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde,” Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été,” and Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.” At Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday night, June 5, 2026.
The concert closed with Claude Debussy’s La Mer. It was a perfect choice to end this historic night. His work gives us the ocean that can never be seen all at once. The first movement is “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea.” It is not only water in the earthly scene. The water continually moves, and the sun takes all of the wet world. The second movement is “Play of the Waves.” It is dreamy with something like an unpredicatable waltz. This magnificent master work, ends with “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.” Its music comes from the water, and the water moves with the wind. It is an amazing portrait of the greatness of nature
San Francisco Symphony with Music Director Designate and Conductor Elim Chan, and Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-soprano, in a performance of Richard Wagner’s “Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde,” Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été,” and Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.” At Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday night, June 5, 2026.
Photos by Stefan Cohen, compliments of the San Francisco Symmphony