Praised as “expressive and stylish” by The Financial Times, Sonnambula is a historically informed ensemble directed by Elizabeth Weinfield that brings to light unknown music for various combinations of early instruments with the lush sound of the viol at the core. While Sonnambula has been presented by the nation’s leading early music presenters (among them Academy of Early Music Ann Arbor, Houston Early Music, Indianapolis Early Music, Madison Early Music Festival, and others), the ensemble has carved out a niche connecting art museums with contemporaneous sound history, as a way of telling interdisciplinary stories about the voices they sound, many of which have been left out of traditional archival sources. This goal governed the creation of their 2019 award-winning album of the complete works of Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), and their 2025 release, Passing Fancy: Beauty in a Moment of Chaos (2025, Avie Records), hailed by BBC Music Magazine as “a beautiful disc.”
Sonnambula is the inaugural Ensemble in Residence at The Frick Collection in 2025–26, where they opened their season with the sold-out premiere of A Black Masque, a landmark collaboration with acclaimed bass-baritone Davóne Tines, described as “ingenious” by The Wall Street Journal and designated “highbrow and brilliant” by New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix. At the Frick they continue the deep work of connecting visual and musical history that they began at the Detroit Institute of Arts, The National Gallery of Art, and as Ensemble in Residence at The Met Cloisters, which was praised by The New Yorker as “remarkable” and “superb.” In October 2023, the ensemble collaborated with The Juilliard School in conjunction with Women in Art and Music: An Early Modern Global Conference.
The ensemble also has a strong commitment to education and outreach, and has presented interactive masterclasses, lecture/demonstrations, museum programs, and composer workshops at Barnard College, Princeton University, The Juilliard School, University of Michigan, and many other colleges and universities. The ensemble’s work over the years at The Hispanic Society of America in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights has included concerts of music by little-known female composers with ties to the early modern Spanish diaspora; premieres of 18th-century Cuban sacred music; Zarzuela!, a program of Spanish theatrical music of the high Baroque; a Covid-era direct-to-screen premiere of Sebastían Duron’s 1696 opera Apolo y Dafne; and a sold-out program of Spanish Golden Age works drawn from the over 450 pieces in the Cancionero Musical de Palacio, a manuscript of Renaissance music at the Royal Palace of Madrid.