Friday, July 18, 2025 | 6:00PM 

WHERE THE WILD THINGS PLAY

Elias Miller, conductor
Bee-thoven, mascot
???, Columbus Zoo

Get ready to experience an unforgettable evening where the power of music meets the beauty of nature. This concert will delight from start to finish with music inspired by and dedicated to our furry and feathered friends and appearances by real animals from the Columbus Zoo, adding a touch of wild charm to the performance. 

Elias Miller

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, and Eun Sun Kim. As theColumbus 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 Night” concerts, and the symphony’s annual concert in Ash Cave. 

Together with flutist Michael Tabak, Miller co-founded the Apollo Ensemble of Boston in 2018. Under Miller’s leadership, Apollo evolved quickly from a small chamber orchestra into a full orchestra with extensive programming. Miller has since conducted Apollo in over 30 concert cycles in venues throughout the Greater Boston Area, collaborating with world-class soloists and living composers. 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.

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 including the Boston premiere of J.A. Hasse’s Alcide al Bivio, the North American premiere of Telemann’s 1745 Johannespassion, 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, Stravinsky, William Grant Still, and Gilbert & Sullivan. 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.

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.