Chan, 39, becomes the first woman to lead the Symphony in its 115-year history, and only the third woman to hold a top-tier American orchestra post. She replaces Esa-Pekka Salonen, who stepped down after a tenure that leaned heavily into contemporary programming and a renovation of the hall's acoustics. Chan's stated goal, as she put it in an interview, is to make the Symphony "cool" — a word that landed differently depending on where people heard it.

Among the regulars who follow the orchestra closely, the hire read as something earned rather than appointed. Several noted that the extended guest-conducting run looked, in retrospect, less like an audition and more like a courtship — the kind of sustained, visible exposure that lets an orchestra and a conductor figure out if they actually want to spend a decade in the same room. "It was like her and the orchestra were psychically connected," one concertgoer wrote online after a recent performance. The rapport was remarked on enough that Chan's appointment, when it came, struck some as confirmation of what the hall's schedule had been quietly signaling.

The word "cool," though, cracked the room open a little. Some heard it as a promise of accessibility — programming that pulls in audiences who find the standard symphonic evening intimidating or simply too expensive. Tickets at Davies can run well past a hundred dollars for decent seats, and the $400-night-out math came up quickly in reaction threads. Others took a more protective stance: good music is its own argument, the logic went, and chasing cultural relevance can blur into something less interesting.

Chan's actual record suggests a conductor comfortable with both poles — standard repertoire and new work — so the tension may resolve itself in programming rather than in a tagline.

Anyone walking past Davies on Grove Street this week would see nothing yet changed: the same marquee, the same season schedule in the display case by the entrance. The shift, when it arrives, is still two years out.