biographies

emilia benjamin  viola da gamba, violin & viola

Emilia plays violin, viol, viola and, on occasion, the lirone in Sonnerie. She plays all of the above elsewhere too, which keeps her on her toes. Emilia has played tenor viol with the viol consort Concordia for 10 years or so, which presents her with the challenge of contemporary music every now and then, and is also a guest member of the consort Phantasm.

In the summer of 2004 she had to learn how to play the bass viol standing and walking, whilst wearing silly clothes, for Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' at the Globe, and toured the USA in 2005 with the same show.

In 2007 Emilia joined Trevor Pinnock's European Brandenburg Ensemble to play viola in Bach's Brandenburg Concertos around Europe and in the Far East. She complained a lot about having to stand up all the way through!

Emilia plays viola pretty often in St Martin in the Fields, and violin too, and can be found cropping up in various orchestras on either of these instruments, if you look carefully. She spends her leisure hours in ferrying her aging dog to and from her parents on trains that are in a permanent state of delay.

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