Biography

Music Director of the Apollo Ensemble of Boston since 2018 and Principal Conductor of the Upbeat New Hampshire Youth Orchestra since 2022, 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, Juanjo Mena, JoAnn Falletta, Scott Yoo, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Eun Sun Kim, Paul McCreesh, Christoph König, Gemma New, Ruth Reinhardt, and Erina Yashima. Miller made his Carnegie Hall debut in the fall of 2023 guest conducting the New York International Symphony Orchestra. Other engagements during the 2023-24 season included work with the Nashville Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra, 5 masterworks concerts with the Apollo Ensemble of Boston, and 3 programs with the Upbeat New Hampshire Youth Orchestra. Summer 2024 will see Miller conduct two more programs with the Apollo Ensemble, lead Upbeat New Hampshire’s summer strings program and conducting workshop, and return to the Colorado College Summer Music Festival as its Assistant Conductor.

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). 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 has also served as the assistant conductor for Opera Saratoga, 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.