Donald Armstrong, associate concertmaster for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, leads members of the Amici Ensemble and 2020 NZCT Chamber Music Contest winners Ravelation for ANOTHER NIGHT IN VIENNA – performing two monumental chamber music works from quite different moments in the history.

For many, Mozart’s concerto for violin and viola is his most endearing and ingenious. The young composer knew both these instruments intimately and their voices blend and bounce off each other in a spectacular conversation made all the more engaging in this clever arrangement for string sextet.

At the end of his career, an ailing Richard Strauss penned an elegy in the days after the WWII bombing of the Vienna Opera House. Drawing on the richness of seven string players moving as one, from the depths of his harmonic world emerges an ever more insistent refrain from Beethoven’s funeral march (Eroica) that is wound through this sweeping memorial for a past changed forever.