Whether on baroque or modern violin, conducting, or artistic directing, Jacob Ashworth spends his life pursuing a paradoxical dream: to specialize… in everything.
Jacob is the Interim Artistic Director of the “categorically imaginative and radical” (New Yorker) Heartbeat Opera, which is fast becoming one of the most influential companies making opera today and which he helped found in 2014. He is also the “impressive Artistic Director” (New York Times) of the stylistically omnivorous ensemble Cantata Profana, which he founded in 2013. As a soloist and freelance music director, Jacob appears in recitals, chamber music performances, and conducting operas throughout the US and abroad.
Equally at home on modern and baroque violin, as a conductor, and occasionally on the medieval vielle, Jacob has gained a reputation as a consummate stylist and curator of music, earning Cantata Profana the 2016 CMA/ASCAP National Award for Adventurous Programming with his vision for crafting theatrical, genre-bending chamber music shows. He has performed extensively on period instruments with groups like Mark Morris Dance Group, American Bach Soloists, TENET, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, New York Baroque Inc., the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, at the Smithsonian Institution, and with Opera Lafayette, where he is thrilled to serve as concertmaster. In contemporary music, he has worked closely with numerous composers and premiered works with New York New Music Ensemble, Princeton Sound Kitchen, MATA Festival, Locrian Chamber Players, The Stone, NOVUS NY, Philadelphia’s Network for New Music, The Cecilia Series of Kansas City, and at the Museo National de Arte in Mexico City. Jacob has been an artist at the Staunton Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas, Wellesley Composer’s Conference, France’s Festival Daniou, Lake George Music Festival, and Music Mountain.
Jacob has been called a “lithe and nimble” (NYTimes) baroque violinist, an “exacting and sensitive” (Boston Globe) new music player, and a “richly detailed” (NYTimes) conductor. With Heartbeat, Jacob has championed the unique practice of leading operas from the violin, "doing powerful work from the music stand” (Opernwelt). His 2015 fully staged performance of György Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragments, an hour-long tour-de-force for violin and voice, was hailed as a “flat-out triumph” by Opera News. His album, “Hermestänze,” on MSR Records, features cycles for solo violin by Susan Kander, played “expressively and knowingly throughout” (Gramophone).
Jacob earned his masters and doctorate from the Yale School of Music under renowned violinist Ani Kavafian and studied baroque violin with Robert Mealy as a member of the Yale Baroque Ensemble. Previous degrees include a Performer Diploma from Indiana University and a Bachelor’s from Manhattan School of Music.
