Respected English conductor George Vass studied at the Birmingham Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Music.

In 1992, he was appointed Artistic Director of the internationally renowned Presteigne Festival in Wales, is founder Artistic Director of Nova Music Opera and is also Artistic Director of Orchestra Nova.

As a guest conductor he has worked with the Bournemouth Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National and Ulster orchestras and has broadcast for BBC Radio 3; his ever-expanding discography includes some thirty commercial recordings for Dutton, Guild, Champs Hill, Lyrita, Naxos, SOMM and Toccata of works by British composers.

In his dual career as conductor and festival director, Vass maintains a strong interest in the performance and promotion of contemporary music. Over the last thirty years he has commissioned and premiered a variety of new works from composers including Martin Butler, Gabriel Jackson, Paweł Łukaszewski, David Matthews, John McCabe, Cecilia McDowall, Paul Patterson, Robert Saxton, Peter Sculthorpe, Huw Watkins and Hugh Wood.

For the operatic stage, Vass premiered Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward (Hampstead and Highgate Festival, 2008; Nova Music Opera revival, 2015) and for Nova Music Opera: Sally Beamish Hagar in the Wilderness (2013), Stephen McNeff Prometheus Drown’d (2014), Cecilia McDowall Airborne (2014) and Charlotte Bray Entanglement (2015). He has also conducted Curlew River (Nova Music Opera, 2013; Hampstead and Highgate Springfest, 2009) and Savitri (Nova Music, English Music Festival, 2010).