David Alan Miller next up in TSO conductor search

Throughout the 2015-16 Tucson Symphony Orchestra season, we are featuring conductors vying to become the next TSO music director.

Who: David Alan Miller, 54, music director of the Albany Symphony in New York.

Concert: “Sibelius & Elgar’s Enigmatic Friends” with guest violinist Elena Urioste.

Bio at a glance: Miller has led the Albany (N.Y.) Symphony since 1992 and spent five years as an associate and assistant conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his native Los Angeles. A graduate of UC-Berkeley, he earned his master’s degree from Juilliard. He is celebrated for his devotion to programming new American music and has won several awards including the ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming. In 1999, he won ASCAP’s inaugural Leonard Bernstein Award for Outstanding Educational Programming.

He won a Grammy Award in 2014 for his Naxos recording of John Corigliano’s “Conjurer” with the Albany Symphony and Dame Evelyn Glennie.

TSO record: He made his TSO debut in the 2014-15 season with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.

Something you’ve come to know about the Old Pueblo: “(Raging) Sage Coffee is the yummiest place in the world. I would sit there and study my scores. It had such a wonderful out-West feeling, maybe because I come from the cold East. And I loved the Young Composers project run by Ilona Vukovic-Gay. I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope Tucson appreciates how special that is.”

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Fondest memory of past experience: “Your first trumpet player Conrad (Jones) played this very challenging trumpet concerto” — Tsontakis’ “True Colors” — “and he played a jazz encore. I thought that Conrad’s playing of the concerto was just incredible. I was quite overwhelmed by it.”

Overall conducting philosophy: “The music that I play is the most thrilling and beautiful music in the world, and I want to share it with an audience as much as possible and share the sheer beauty of it with them. ... I believe that the musicians are the most important thing. I know that sounds weird, but I think a lot of conductors believe they somehow make the music. But to me, a conductor is an enabler, someone who empowers the musicians to do their best.”

Something we should know about you before showtime: “I love your orchestra. They were so passionate and connected to playing the pieces. They were so committed and they played like their lives depended on it.”

About your program: “It’s three pieces by composers I love deeply and that I’m very close to. ... The Elgar Variations is an absolute masterpiece. He ... paints musical pictures of his friends and family. I love that piece and it’s so expressive and so wonderfully English.

“The Sibelius is one of the great romantic violin masterpieces. ... It’s really gorgeous. ... It’s sort of like the Elgar — a real wonderful window into the composer’s life.

“(Composer Joan) Tower’s music is exceedingly rhythmically vital. ... This is a piece that really features the three solo percussionists in the orchestra. It’s a piece all about drumming. You have this really rhythmic percussive piece.”