Elim Chan emits a screech and cups her face in her hands, recalling an event at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA last spring. She was conducting Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony when the sound of a moan erupted from a concert-goer in the balcony.
“Everyone could hear it, I could also see it. The person was sitting to the left, next to the organ. Actually, at first I was really worried, thinking it was a heart attack,” she says. “I continued to conduct, trying to hold the Tchaikovsky together, signalling to the musicians that they should keep going, but knowing I had to be ready to stop at any moment.”
The interruption made headlines: the Los Angeles Times reported that audience members believed the woman in question had emitted a “full body orgasm” during the second movement, with one witness describing the disruption as “quite beautiful”.
Chan says she will probably never discover what really happened. “The person disappeared, possibly embarrassed, who knows? But I was very amused how it quickly became a story of its own. It took off.” Jimmy Kimmel was in touch, “asking me to come on his show. And the Daily Mail. But what do I do? I didn’t make the sound. No, no, no!”
Though she doesn’t dismiss the notion that it may have been the potency of the music produced under her baton that triggered such an overwhelming response, she would not dream of taking any credit for it. “But Tchaikovsky! If anyone knows how to build a climax, it’s him. And it happened when we hadn’t even reached the biggest moment in the piece.”
“I would always encourage people to react,” she says, remembering a night in Glasgow with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in 2021, when, during a piece by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, “two elderly ladies sitting close by literally cheered out loud. At first I thought, ‘Oh no, the orchestra will be disturbed.’ But they actually loved the spontaneity of their reaction. I wish that would happen more often.”
Hong Kong-born Chan, 37, conducts the First Night of the Proms later this month, leading the BBC Singers, Symphony Chorus and Symphony Orchestra in a programme that includes Beethoven’s Fifth, Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, performed by star soloist Isata Kanneh-Mason. The evening will also feature the world premiere of Hallelujah Sim, a piece commissioned at Chan’s request from the Japanese-British – and Kent-based – composer Ben Nobuto, who is bringing postmodern, electronic elements to the Proms. “He is someone I’m really curious to work with,” she says, describing his music as “refreshing and innovative” – his composition counterpointing a programme she readily admits is “very Germanic”.
In the past, Chan has enjoyed the ambience of being a Proms attendee herself, standing in the Royal Albert Hall arena, or high up in the gallery, where she marvels at the fact that “you can lie down, have a picnic”. But to be centre-stage, on the conductor’s podium – “in the middle of the sound” – is “not even a dream come true, because it was truly beyond the realm of my dreaming”.
Chan made her Proms debut in 2019, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. She returned in 2023 and still can’t believe they let her loose with Elgar’s Enigma Variations. “I was like: ‘Are you kidding me?’ Conduct the most iconic, quintessential British piece? Look at me: I’m a petite Asian girl!”
She found it “totally intimidating” that the BBC Symphony Orchestra had recorded the work with Leonard Bernstein, but felt liberated to even come to the realisation that: “I will never be Bernstein, I can only be me … The Proms audience made me feel like a rock star.”
Chan’s career in music took form relatively late. She initially studied psychology at Smith College in Massachusetts, before she changed to music, graduating in 2009. “Growing up in Hong Kong, you are told you should be a doctor, a lawyer, do business … My dad is an artist so knows how hard it is to pursue the arts. He always says: ‘If you don’t do it 100%, don’t even touch it.’”
She came to conducting almost by accident, after hearing at age eight a Hong Kong Sinfonietta concert conducted by its female director, Yip Wing-sie. “Watching someone like me on stage left a strong impression,” she says.
When she was 13, her school choir leader briefly put her in charge of the singers so she could better hear the music from the back of the room. “I loved that feeling that I had the magic at my fingertips,” she says. It’s a feeling that has not lessened over the years: she adds that Mickey Mouse’s turn as a magical conductor in Disney’s Fantasia was also an early inspiration.
Chan’s rise to prominence began when she won the Donatella Flick conducting competition in 2014 – the first (and still only) female winner in the competition’s 34-year history.
“Times have changed and there are more opportunities today,” she says, “not just for women, but for people who have not had the opportunities before – be it related to skin colour or background – which is wonderful. At the same time it has become more difficult, because the pressure is so high due to everything being so visible now. So in some ways it’s like a double-edged sword – just one mistake, and ‘oh look, she’s not ready’. And not everyone is on board; there are still prejudices in the orchestras, among audiences.”
She continues: “We’re in a time when women need to find their own way of leading, of being true to themselves; whether you wear a dress, or pants, have short or long hair. Authenticity, being honest and being who you are, is very powerful. Not all orchestras are ready to take that.”
A five-year stint at the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra recently came to an end. Chan now harbours ambitions to move farther afield, possibly to the US, and is said by those close to her to simply be waiting for the right call. In the meantime, she has a busy summer ahead – as well as her Proms appearance is an invitation to open the Hollywood Bowl, plus dates at the Salzburg and Edinburgh festivals and a return visit to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw orchestra.
Right now, home for Chan is in Amsterdam, where she lives with her husband, the Dutch percussionist Dominique Vleeshouwers. Her parents, though, are in London, where they moved as deteriorating political freedoms in Hong Kong took hold. “The whole Chan clan will be there at the Proms,” she says with a broad smile, but remains deeply saddened by her loss of her birthplace. Her enduring sense of identity as a Hongkonger “is something I can continue living”, she says. “And if people ask me why I’m so happy to be in the Proms to do the first night, one of the reasons is because I’m the first Hongkonger to do so. A proud one at that.”
She might also be the first Proms conductor to box. When not music-making or reading detective novels (Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes are favourites), she enjoys the sport, a hobby she took up at a Barbican gym while she was the London Symphony Orchestra’s assistant conductor in 2015-16 – when she also worked alongside impresarios like Valery Gergiev, Sir Simon Rattle and the late Bernard Haitink, who she describes as her mentor.
“There’s not one of them who doesn’t complain about having back and shoulder pain or neck tension, so I thought I should also start taking care of myself,” she says of her interest in pugilism. “Like in conducting, it’s about the stamina and the core. You have to really think about everything from the angle to the punch. You have to mean it in order to make an impact.”
• Elim Chan conducts the First Night of the Proms on 19 July, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Edinburgh international festival on 18 August.
