The memorableSan Francisco Symphony debutin January of conductor Elim Chan suggested the arrival of a promising podium talent, one who combines lithe physical command with a wealth of artistic resources.

Chan returned to Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Oct. 26, and immediately — like, within the first two minutes of her program — made it abundantly clear that that earlier showing was no fluke.

Far from it. Leading the orchestra in music by Benjamin Britten and Gustav Holst, the Hong Kong native displayed a formidable array of skills, both technical and interpretive. She’s the real deal.

For one thing, Chan, who is principal conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Belgium, projects a degree of physical authority from the podium that is rare to witness. All she has to do is raise her arms and the orchestra responds with torrents of finely shaped sounds, as if she were some kind of Wagnerian superhero bending the sonic environment to her will.

同时,她为e留下足够的空间loquent turns of phrase and the slight fluctuations in rhythm that make music sound truly alive. On Thursday, that blend of rock-ribbed precision and expressive freedom yielded phenomenal results.

Not only could you hear Chan straddling that divide, but you could see it too. Every conductor has to find ways to convey both the rhythmic pulse of a piece of music and the shape and rhetoric of individual phrases.

Many conductors delegate those tasks separately to their two hands, beating time with one and guiding musical phrasing with the other.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Symphony’s music director, often addresses the two tasks sequentially — he’ll sometimes lead with balletic gestures, then turn into a crisp metronome when the rhythms become trickier.

Chan somehow does both at once. Conducting all night without a baton, she almost always let both hands operate in parallel. Yet each hand was simultaneously setting a rhythmic pace and shepherding the orchestra through the expressive substance of the music.

Chan’s welcome appearance only happened by chance. The English conductorDaniel Hardingwas originally scheduled to lead this week’s concerts, but he withdrew in September to lead the Cleveland Orchestra’s planned Israeli concert tour in place of ailing Music DirectorFranz Welser-Möst. (That tour, naturally, has been canceled with the onset of war.)

Her arrival brought a change in the program as well. Instead of singing Ralph Vaughan Williams’ orchestral song cycle “On Wenlock Edge,” the English tenor Andrew Staples made his Symphony debut with “Les Illuminations,” Britten’s heady early song cycle set to texts of Arthur Rimbaud.

Staples’ elegant, fine-grained sonority proved most apt for the more transparent sections of Britten’s score — the graceful, dance-like “Antique,” and especially the tender movement titled “Being Beauteous,” which elicited Staples’ most ravishingly sweet-toned singing.

When the music became denser and more vigorous, though, Staples’ contributions tended to fade. Whether his tone is simply not large enough for the circumstances, or whether Chan was at fault for letting the strings-only orchestra cover him, is not a question I’m prepared to adjudicate.

In either case, the performance’s sheer explosiveness and eloquence was hard to deny. Wyatt Underhill, the orchestra’s acting associate concertmaster, provided several incisively shaped violin solos; principal violist Jonathan Vinocour and principal cellistRainer Eudeikismade the most of their brief moment in the spotlight during the central “Interlude.”

After intermission, Chan led the orchestra in a rendition of Holst’s orchestral suite “The Planets” that summed up everything spectacular about the evening.

The bellicose opening movement, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” got a taut, potent reading, with the percussion section driving the music forward on its relentless five-beat tread and the brass mustering terrifyingly bold banks of sound. The movement was followed by a respectful — or possibly awestruck — moment of silence, before one patron in the balcony gave voice to the entire audience’s feeling with an exhilarated whoop and a burst of applause.

The crystalline tones of “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” landed as precisely the contrast Holst must have intended, and although the rapid-fire scurrying of “Mercury, the Winged Messenger” sounded a bit blurry, the rest of the suite unfolded with one marvel after another.

Chan and the orchestra conjured up Holst’s pictorial inventions perfectly — the weighty infirmity of the aged Saturn, the puckish delights of Uranus and finally, the eerie chill of the far-off Neptune, embodied by the women of the Symphony singing unseen from the upper balcony. (There’s no movement for Pluto, which was still undiscovered when Holst wrote the piece in 1916 and has since been bounced from the planetary pantheon.)

At intermission, a well-connected observer whispered unconfirmed rumors in my ear, which I unapologetically pass along, about the strong bond that’s been forming in recent years between Chan and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Philharmonic will need a new music director by 2026, whenGustavo Dudamel拉股份和叛逃到领导新哟rk Philharmonic.

Make of that scuttlebutt what you will, if anything. But Thursday’s triumph suggested that the orchestra could do worse — and that Chan’s next appearance in San Francisco is something to look forward to with unreserved excitement.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com