A sensitive, precise, energetic talent with a budding international career, maestro Thiago Tiberio is often praised by his peers for mature musicianship, clarity of expression, and accurate technique.
A multifaceted musician, his classical, operatic, and film music career includes work with orchestras in the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina, to name a few.
Working extensively in live-to-picture synchronization concerts, Mr. Tiberio has premiered Star Wars in Concert in France, Portugal, Brazil, and Argentina; Coco in Concert in the United States; The Sound of Magic and Fantasia in Italy; Beauty and the Beast in Georgia; Lion King and Toy Story in Qatar; Cinema Paradiso in Switzerland and Taiwan; and La La Land in Turkey and China.
He has conducted concert world premières of Paddington (England), How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Grease (United States), Call Me By Your Name (Korea), and Cinema Paradiso and Love Actually (Japan). And as arranger and orchestrator, he assisted in the world premières of Get Out and Coraline (United States), Hunger Games (Switzerland), and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (Scotland).
Mr. Tiberio’s stage work include orchestration, synchronization, music direction, and conducting of world- and country-premières of Magia y Sinfonía (2022) and Disney 100 (2023) for Disney Latin America. Both shows include live-to-picture synchronization of large, complex orchestras with casts of singers, dancers, acrobats, and Disney characters, opera-quality staging and props, 4D effects such as projection mapping, fog, fire and CO2 canons, snow, and confetti, and even some light acting in Spanish and English! Starting in Argentina at Teatro Colón, he presented these shows in Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Puerto Rico, always to great acclaim. These follow his work as music director of La Traviata and The Flying Dutchman (Bulgaria) after having worked as assistant conductor to John Mauceri in Turandot and Les Vêpres Siciliennes (Spain). A mild opera fanatic, he is often seen attending dress rehearsals at the MET Opera, in New York.
Finally, in the classical domain, his latest accolades include a concert of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony with Neojiba Youth Orchestra, hailed by critics as “genius”, and a concert with the Orquestra Sinfônica Nacional of Brazil which included the world-premiere of a new Critical Edition of Walter Burle Marx’s Fantasia Sobre o Thema do Hymno Nacional, as well as the first time in 40 years that his Symphony No. 3 was performed—marking the beginning of an extensive musical restoration project by the maestro. He also led the San Francisco Symphony in the American première of John Mauceri’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, with Alan Cumming as narrator.
Mr. Tiberio is a specialist in musical synchronization to film, having conducted orchestras in scoring sessions during most of his career. This naturally led to positions in live-to-picture concert productions, such as Star Wars Live in Concert, Pixar in Concert, Danny Elfman: Music from the Films of Tim Burton, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Lord of the Rings: Live to Projection, and others. He premiered the fully orchestrated version of Coco in Concert for Disney, closing the 2019 Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Philharmonic.
Fusing his conducting experience with an award-winning training as a composer, he has arranged, orchestrated, and directed concert adaptations of a variety of films, such as Love Actually, The Hunger Games, Cinema Paradiso, The Goonies, Grease, Twilight, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Paddington, Coraline, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Get Out, and Call My By Your Name.
Joining his jazz expertise with the orchestral world, Mr. Tiberio arranged, orchestrated, and directed Get Happy: A Judy Garland Centennial Celebration. He also conducted a concert celebrating Arturo Sandoval, performing alongside the multi-Grammy-Award-winning trumpeter-composer and his sextet, as well as a variety of concerts featuring Latin American music.
Tiberio is also the official conductor of America’s Wonders, the world’s first 3-dimensional, IMAX-style cinematic journey with live orchestra—a celebration of America’s most breathtaking national parks and cities with classical, pop, and original music meticulously synchronized to picture. He also composed and orchestrated a large portion of the music in the show.
Mr. Tiberio’s many awards include:
As a composer, Mr. Tiberio writes concert as well as film music. His prize-winning works have been performed in notable locations worldwide, such as the United Nations in New York City, and by acclaimed musicians, including members of the Orchestre Lamoureux in Paris, France—known for premiering works of Debussy and Ravel.
His beloved Três Rascunhos para Clarinete em Si bemol (2009) awarded him a Woodwind Quintet Residency at New York University, leading to the composition of Vinhetas do diário de um musicista (2009), which in turn opened the doors to the Musica Nueva Málaga festival that same year, for which his orchestral composition Sê Natural won the Best Composition Award.
Back in New York, the film Air: The True Story of Gil C. Alicea, a feature documentary with his score, was chosen to open the 2012 Long Island Latino International Film Festival, and the acclaimed web series Be Strong Be Naked resulted in the composition of over three hours of music, from which a soundtrack album is to be released.
In 2016, his Choro No. 1 and Choro No. 2 were premièred at Theatro Municipal João Caetano, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in a historically significant concert: it marked the first time that the Porta Corta-Fogo, Roberto Burle Marx’s largest painting, until then unknown, was presented to the public in a concert setting. This began a long, fruitful collaboration with the Walter Burle Marx Estate, leading to his accepting the Presidency of the Burle Marx Music Society.
In 2019, Mr. Tiberio became one of four living composers to write original music for America’s Wonders, the world’s first 3-dimensional, IMAX-style cinematic journey with live orchestra. Acclaimed are his Water, a 12 1/2-minute score to scenes of the water-based American national parks, and Shenandoah, an original arrangement of the traditional melody for strings and harp. He also created the synchronization assets for this show and, later in 2024, for Lasting Impressions, a 3D show consisting of impressionistic paintings coming to life in sync with music by Debussy, Ravel, and other French composers.
Mr. Tiberio studied with Robert Hart Baker, Daniel Meyer, Dinu Ghezzo, John Mauceri, and Dejan Savić, thus carrying forward the legacies of Herbert von Karajan, Otto-Werner Mueller, Gustav Meier, Sir Andrew Davis, Charles Dutoit, James Levine, and Leonard Bernstein.
He holds a Masters in Music Composition from New York University and Bachelors degrees in Music and in Business Administration from Mars Hill University—all summa cum laude.
As President of the Burle Marx Music Society, he administers the musical estate of Walter Burle Marx, a prolific though largely unknown Brazilian modernist composer and conductor who was responsible for bringing Heitor Villa-Lobos to the international stage.
Mr. Tiberio is actively involved in the community. He is a leader of the Caravan of Love, a program of the Inner Enlightenment Spiritist Society which brings musical healing to the elderly in nursing homes and to mental health patients in the area’s hospitals.
In addition, Mr. Tiberio is always interested community development efforts, readily accepting any speaking or meet-and-greet opportunities that help educate and build audiences—and he can be an eloquent, passionate, engaging speaker.
Perhaps the only maestro in the world who makes his own batons and binds his own scores in hardcover, Mr. Tiberio is a polyglot and a multi-intrumentalist.
He used to be an information technology consultant, holder of nine certifications in IT, including a Microsoft-Certified Systems Engineer credential. Before this, he worked as an auditor of non-profit organizations and as a piano technician.
Today, through his production company, Tiberio Music Design & Publishing, he creates and publishes music for live performance while retaining the capability to record, edit, master, and publish high-definition audiovisual recordings of concerts. Oh, and he is an avid woodworker.
A classical and jazz musician, Mr. Tiberio lives in New York with his wife Patricia and their Maltese, Dòri.
