Luis Gabriel Biava is currently in his seventeenth year as Music Director of the New Albany Symphony and has worked with major artists including Jon Kimura Parker, David Finckel, Chee Yun, Soovin Kim, Karen Gomyo, Hilary Hahn, and Blanca Uribe, Itzhak Perlman, and Branford Marsalis, as well as local soloists from the New Albany Symphony and young artist winners from the NASO Concerto Competition.

Mr. Biava has studied conducting with Michael Jinbo at the Pierre Monteux School, Hancock, Maine; and with his father, who served as conductor-in-residence of the Philadelphia Orchestra and conducting professor at Temple University. He attended the Aspen Music Festival, where he studied with David Zinman and Murry Sidlin, and also served as principal cellist. He has conducted at the Cincinnati Conservatory with Mark Gibson and Gustav Meier in their Stravinsky, Brahms, Ravel, Schumann and Tchaikovsky workshops. As Music Director of Opera Libera he has led performances of La boheme, Le Nozze di Figaro, L’elisir d’amore, and Don Pasquale.

Mr. Biava has conducted the Columbus Symphony in a set of educational concerts at various schools and a series of outdoor community concerts in Columbus and performed at the Ohio Statehouse in a celebration of the 100th year of the Suffragette movement. Most recently, he conducted one of the Columbus Symphony’s summer Popcorn Pops programs. In addition to the New Albany Symphony, he regularly conducts the Bogota Philharmonic, the National Orchestra of Guatemala, and the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional De Colombia. He has been guest conductor with the Greater Columbus Community Orchestra, the Claremont Symphony, the Newark-Granville Symphony, the Akron Youth Symphony, and the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra. He was also invited to conduct the Advanced String Orchestra in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has served as the cover conductor for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Biava is also Music Director of Columbus’ Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra and is in his third year as conductor of BalletMet’s production of the Nutcracker. He made his conducting debut with the Medellin Philharmonic in November of 2021 with pianists Blanca Uribe and Teresa Gomez.

Mr. Biava is the principal cellist of Columbus Symphony Orchestra, artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Dublin, and is a founding member of the chamber group Camarata. He is also music director of the Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra. He is active as a soloist in the standard concerto repertory and new works and is also very involved as a chamber musician. With the Camarata Trio, which includes New Albany Symphony concertmaster Ariane Sletner and pianist Suzanne Newcomb, he has recently performed the complete Beethoven and Mozart trio cycles, along with significant contemporary works of Carter, Higdon, Bernstein, Pärt, Auerbach and Read Thomas.

Mr. Biava’s family represents four generations of musicians. His first cello studies were with his uncle, Miguel Uribe, in his native Colombia, where he performs regularly with the Biava-Uribe Trio. He attended the University of Michigan, where he received a bachelor’s degree in cello performance, and obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Leonard Rose. Mr. Biava’s other teachers include Oliver Edel, Samuel Mayes, Gabor Rejto, and Elsa Hilger. Mr. Biava’s educational endeavors also include the School of Orchestral Studies in Saratoga Springs—a program for young musicians that mirrors the repertoire of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the three weeks of their residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. He has performed various concertos, including Elgar, Saint-Saëns, the Vivaldi Double Concerto, Dvorak, and other contemporary concertos; as well as, with the Columbus Symphony, Shostakovich, Haydn, Schumann, and Don Quixote.