Music Director
Elias Miller
About
Assistant Conductor of the Columbus Symphony, Music Director of the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra, and Music Director of the Apollo Ensemble of Boston, Elias Miller has established a reputation as a leading young conductor and orchestra builder. He has worked with numerous orchestras across the United States including the New York Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Albany Symphony, assisting notable conductors such as Giancarlo Guerrero, Thomas Wilkins, Juanjo Mena, JoAnn Falletta, Scott Yoo, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Eun Sun Kim, Paul McCreesh, Christoph König, Gemma New, Ruth Reinhardt, Erina Yashima, and David Alan Miller. Miller made his Carnegie Hall debut in the fall of 2023 guest conducting the New York International Symphony Orchestra. Now the orchestra’s principal conductor, Miller returned to conduct them in another program in February 2025, this time in the Harvard Club of Boston. As the Columbus Symphony‘s assistant conductor, Miller regularly conducts education, pops, and community concerts with the esteemed orchestra including in-school concerts, young people’s concerts, family concerts, holiday pops, popcorn pops, and picnic with the pops programs. Summer 2025 will see Miller lead the symphony in several full classical programs, conducting three “Summer Night” concerts and the symphony’s annual performance in Ash Cave.
An active conductor of opera and oratorio, Miller conducted Festival Theater Hudson‘s inaugural performance: a staged production of Wagner’s Die Walküre (Act I) in 2021 and co-conducted a production of Philip Glass’ La Belle et la Bête, at the University of Houston’s Moores Opera Center in 2022. Between 2016 and 2019, Miller led the Harvard Early Music Society in several premieres of operatic works. These productions included the Boston premiere of J.A. Hasse’s Alcide al Bivio in collaboration with the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, the North American premiere of Telemann’s 1745 Johannespassion, a production that featured famed countertenor Charles Humphries and earned Miller an enthusiastic preview in the Boston Globe, and the North American premiere of J.A. Hasse’s Sanctus Petrus et Sancta Maria Magdalena. Miller has also conducted performances of operas by Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice, Independent Opera Production), Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress, Harvard College Opera), William Grant Still (Minette Fontaine, Graduate Students at the University of Michigan), and Gilbert & Sullivan (Ruddigore, Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players). Miller served as Assistant Conductor on a staged production of West Side Story – a collaboration between Opera Columbus, BalletMet, CAPA, and the Columbus Symphony – in 2025 and as the Assistant Conductor of Opera Saratoga in summer 2020.
From 2022 until 2024, Miller served as the Principal Conductor of Upbeat New Hampshire, an El Sistema USA member program. While there, Miller established an honors chamber music program and an annual week-long conducting workshop with a professional ensemble. Other ensembles he has conducted in the past include the Pro Arte Orchester in Vienna, Austria, the Hudson Festival Orchestra, the University of Michigan’s Symphony, Philharmonia, and Campus orchestras, the Ann Arbor Camerata, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra Chamber Players, The Weston Wind Quintet & Friends, the Medomak Festival Orchestra, and the Chromos Collaborative Orchestra. Miller twice served as assistant conductor at the Colorado College Summer Music Festival, conducting a variety of programs with the festival’s orchestra. Miller has also served as the assistant conductor for the Boston Chamber Symphony and the Orchestra Book Club..
A distinguished pianist and cellist, Miller has performed solo recitals in the United States and in Europe on both instruments and has served as a vocal coach and rehearsal pianist for many operatic productions. He holds degrees from Harvard University (A.B. in Music, summa cum laude) and the University of Michigan (M.M. in Orchestral Conducting) and completed his postgraduate studies at the University for Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Miller’s teachers and mentors include Mark Stringer, Scott Yoo, Kenneth Kiesler, Federico Cortese, and his father, David Alan Miller.
APOLLO ENSEMBLE OF BOSTON 