Music Director

Maestra Tania Miller

Music Director

The 2012/2013 season marks Tania Miller’s tenth as Music Director of the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, an appointment that deemed her the first Canadian woman to be appointed to such a significant position in Canada.  Her vibrancy and dynamic approach to music-making have inspired many new innovations with the Victoria Symphony and a new era of artistic growth for the orchestra.  New programming innovations including the New Currents Festival of New Music, the contemporary Odyssey series of collaborative arts and genres, the Victoria Mozart Festival, expanded and committed educational programming, and extraordinary commitment to masterworks classics have elevated the musical impact of the orchestra on the Canadian music scene.

Prior to her appointment in Victoria, Ms. Miller was Assistant and then Associate conductor with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for four seasons.  She was the Assistant Conductor of the Carmel Bach Festival for several years working closely with the internationally renowned conductor Bruno Weil and many of the world’s leading Baroque artists.  Tania began her work in the field of contemporary music as Assistant conductor of the Banff Festival of the Arts in Banff, Canada.  She has been a frequent guest conductor with the Toronto contemporary ensemble ERGO, with whom she premiered a number of compositions in Munich, Toronto and New York.

Ms. Miller is active as a guest conductor throughout North America.  Her guest conducting engagements include the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montreal, Winnipeg Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Tucson Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, and she recently returned to Europe to conduct the Berne Symphoniker in Switzerland.

Maestra Miller’s first passion was in the area of opera where she served as Artistic Director of Michigan Opera Works in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four seasons conducting many operas of the baroque and classical era.   She was a regular guest conductor with Opera McGill’s prestigious opera program in 2000 and 2001 in Montreal, Canada.

Originally from Foam Lake, Saskatchewan, Tania Miller received her Doctorate and Master’s degrees in conducting from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

What the media has to say

“It was wonderful to hear this dark, lovely, somber work reclaimed by such a masterly performance by the VSO, led by Tania Miller, and what a gift she is to the city’s orchestra. She has absolute authority over the score, clarifying its dense textures, her long term thoughts giving it the shape it needs and bringing out every detail, its variety, its delicious orientalisms, the ravishments of the slow movement. She has the gift of disappearing into the music, the sign of a true conductor. It was 45 minutes of bliss.”
- Vancouver Sun

“…the audience called Tania Miller back for two encores, the second becoming a standing ovation. She had earlier complemented the SSO on a grand week together. The feeling should be mutual as Miller’s passionate, poetic, and highly articulate conducting was certainly a treat for the audience.”
- Saskatoon Star Phoenix

“From the resonant opening chord to the tumultuous closing bars Miller directed a reading which seldom, if ever, put a foot wrong. ”
- Victoria Times Colonist

Interesting facts

Tania Miller is the 8th Music Director in the History of the Victoria Symphony, following:

Melvin Knudsen (1941-1948)
Hans Gruber (1948-1964)
Otto Werner Mueller (1964-1967)
Laszlo Gati (1967-1978)
Paul Freeman (1979-1988)
Peter McCoppin (1989-1999)
Kees Bakels (1999-2001)

The female equivalent of the male appellation “Maestro” in Italian is “Maestra”.