John Taylor Ward returns to Joe's Pub with another sparkling set of tunes and tones from the wildest corners of music history. This year's show ventures into rare worlds of medieval and folk music with Cantata Profana's Artistic Director Jacob Ashworth on violins and vielles and special guests Nina Stern on every kind of recorder and wind instrument you can imagine, and Paul Morton on lutes, guitars, and if you're lucky, a banjo. 

A “crack ensemble” (The New Yorker) with “a taste for the dramatic” (The New York Times), Cantata Profana is passionately dedicated to new music, old music “to most anything, so long as the mixture is put together thoughtfully and put across persuasively” (The New York Times). Our artists are specialists in a dizzying array of musical genres, able to transform themselves from “a stylish early music ensemble” (The New York Times) into “exacting and sensitive” performers of contemporary music (Boston Globe) all within one show. At the heart of each signature Cantata Profana production is a vision for a new kind of programming: breathing life into classical music by carefully and lovingly curating rarely-heard works from every chapter of music history and reveling in how it all fits together.