Tobias Lea

Tobias Lea, from Adelaide in Australia, is a violist of the Vienna Philharmonic. He joined the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in 1994 and became a member of the Philharmonic in 1998, and has since spent three decades in a viola section that supplies the inner glow so characteristic of the Vienna sound. The solo viola part in Strauss’s Don Quixote, the voice of the earthbound squire Sancho Panza, is one of the great character roles in the orchestral viola repertoire, demanding both comic timing and a singing tone, and here it is taken by a player who can step forward as a soloist while remaining fully part of the ensemble.