Posted on Alexander Lamont Miller’s Facebook page, a selfie in the H-E-B Performance Hall.

Teddy Abrams

Hear a MIDI version of Alexander Lamont Miller’s Scherzo Crypto on Soundcloud.

Julie Albers Photo: Chester Higgins Jr.

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San Antonio Symphony, Teddy Abrams, Julie Albers

November 15, 2014 A welcome reappearance by the cellist Julie  Albers and a vibrant new work by Alexander  Lamont Miller were among the pleasures on  an all-American concert by the San Antonio  Symphony, Nov. 14 in the Tobin Center.  Teddy Abrams, in his first season as music  director of the Louisville Orchestra, was the  guest conductor. Ms. Albers first appeared with this orchestra  in 2001 with an extraordinary account of  Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations. She is also  remembered for a 2009 visit to the San  Antonio Chamber Music Society as a member  of the Albers Trio, with her sisters Laura  (violin) and Rebecca (viola).  Her vehicle this time was Samuel Barber’s  Cello Concerto of 1945. The work is less  frequently performed than Barber’s violin  and piano concerti, in part because it shares  neither the treacly romanticism of the former  nor the showiness of the latter. But the  middle slow movement represents Barber’s  humane lyricism at its best, and Ms. Albers’s  understated but fully engaged performance  elicited from the audience that profound silence that indicates rapt attention. As for virtuosity, there are fireworks aplenty in the third-movement cadenza, and here, too, the cellist shone. The work also makes some technical demands whose difficulties were not apparent in Ms. Albers’s deft performance: She tossed off a fearsome double-stop passage early in the first movement as though it were no big deal.  Throughout, she projected a bright, limpid, lively tone and applied deep intelligence to every phrase.   percussion, electric bells and airplane propellers. Over the Plains is not so obviously avant-garde, but it is subversive in its own way. At its base it is a well-observed imitation (or maybe a deadpan parody) of the broad, sappy Hollywood film music that Antheil detested. (He himself worked in Hollywood and wrote music for films and television between 1936 and 1955, though his adventurous style eventually put him on the outs with the major studios.) Daubed here and there on top of that base are thick, gnarly, dissonant interjections. Think “American Gothic” affixed with wads of chewing gum.  Somewhat similar in means but reverent in  motivation was Charles Ives’s “Thanksgiving  and Forefathers Day” from the Holidays  Symphony. The music is a dense cloud of  assorted hymn tunes, culminating in a full-out  statement of “O God, Beneath Thy Guiding  Hand.” Mr. Abrams asked the audience to  provide the chorus for that hymn and even led  a rehearsal, but in the ensuing performance  the (non-union) audience missed its cue.  Well, at least the orchestra did its job with  skill, and Mr. Abrams nicely brought out the  score’s delicate colorations.  The concert closed with Leonard Bernstein’s  Symphonic Dances from West Side Story in a  performance that was notable for the raw,  nervous, urban energy Mr. Abrams brought  to the Prologue and “Rumble.”  The orchestra continues its acoustical adjustments to the new H-E-B Performance Hall. For this concert the shell was at full depth, the forestage reflector was tilted, and the stage extension was up. The brass and percussion were placed on a low platform across the rear of the shell, and the violins were set just inside the proscenium. The sound as a whole had good presence and was fairly open, though not very enveloping at my seat on the fourth row of the mezzanine. As before, passages at mezzo-piano and softer sounded wonderful. Loud tutti passages sounded less congested than in some earlier configurations. A few more permutations and combinations remain to be tried. Mike Greenberg 

Dispatches from America

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Mr. Miller’s Scherzo Crypto, his contribution to the orchestra’s season-long series of brief “American Preludes” commissions, is a wild, nutty, propulsive, intensely rhythmic piece with gobs of brilliant color from riotous percussion and pugilistic brass, though a quiet, mysterious midsection showcases the strings and woodwinds. It’s an exciting, complex piece, recalling in some ways the best mid-20th-century American symphonists. Mr. Abrams led a spirited, well-crafted performance. It was followed by a rarity, George Antheil’s Over the Plains (1946). Antheil is best known for his Dadaesque, industrial-aesthetic Ballet mécanique, a 1924 work originally composed for 16 synchronized player pianos plus oodles of 

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