A relatively young organisation, Nova Music Opera has established itself as a leading commissioner of new work, working with singers and instrumentalists of the highest calibre. Its focus being on artistic excellence and simple production, but always with music at its heart.

The brainchild of respected conductor and festival director, George Vass, and founding producer Alison Porter, Nova Music Opera presented its first independent fully-staged production at the 2010 English Music Festival – Gustav Holst’s Savitri, performed together with Frederick Delius’s incidental music to Hassan.

Nova Music Opera began a long-standing relationship with director Richard Williams in 2013, when it celebrated the Britten centenary with a national tour of Curlew River and a specially commissioned companion piece from Sally Beamish – Hagar in the Wilderness. The company has gone on to successfully commission and premier a collection of chamber operas from British composers: Charlotte Bray Entanglement (2015), Cecilia McDowall Airborne (2014), Stephen McNeff Prometheus Drown’d (2014), Joseph Phibbs Juliana (2018) and Luke Styles/Benjamin Britten Awakening Shadow (2021). The company has performed at St John’s Smith Square, LSO St Luke’s, the Cheltenham, Canterbury, Presteigne and St Andrew’s Voices festivals, at the Barber Institute in Birmingham and for Music at Oxford.