Sonnambula, a New York City based viol consort, presents “Royal Wedding: Music from Historic Renaissance Marriages,” a program of Renaissance wedding music, at Trinity Church in Princeton on Sunday, October 2, at 8 p.m. It is a homecoming for Elizabeth Weinfield, the ensemble’s founder and director. Weinfield graduated from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School in 1998 and from Rutgers in 2002.
“The music was composed for royal and aristocratic weddings of note from the Renaissance and Baroque periods,” says Weinfield. “Composers such as Bassano, Monteverdi, Malvezzi, Lully, and others wrote some of their best music as commissions for nuptial festivities, both to entertain guests and to impress the famous couple.”
Selections on the program will feature work for the viola da gamba (the Renaissance and Baroque courtly instrument of choice by composers from Italy, France, Germany, England, and Holland, including Monteverdi, Jenkins, Lully, Ives, Bassano, and Malvezzi.
“Sonnambula is a consort of viols that performs Renaissance and Baroque repertoire for large ensembles, and in so doing brings together some of today’s most exciting gambists and performers of early music,” says Weinfield. “The group performs music for diverse combinations of viols, and instrumentation varies at every concert.”
Weinfield, who performs on the tenor viol, is also a member of the viol consort Long & Away. She has appeared as a baroque violist and viol player with such ensembles as Anonymous 4, Lionhart, The New York Consort of Viols, Siren Baroque, Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Festival, and Parthenia.
Weinfield holds a master’s degree in music from Oxford University. She is currently a PhD candidate in historical musicology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she is writing on 17th-century French pastoral music and iconography.
A former researcher at the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments, she is the content editor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Helibrunn Timeline of Art History,” a publication to which she contributes as a writer on music, and adjunct professor of music at Yeshiva University. Her recent credits on modern viola include a recording of Gregory Spears’s Requiem.
“So much of this beautiful music is sadly underperformed, and not known about, partly because it is so old,” says Weinfield. “We are excited to bring it to a new audience in Princeton.”
Renaissance Wedding Music, Sonnambula, Trinity Church, 33 Mercer Street, Princeton. Sunday, October 2, 8 p.m. Free-will donation. 609-924-2277. www.sonnambula.org.
