A relatively young arts organisation, the Nova Music Trust has established itself as a successful company working with singers and instrumentalists of the highest calibre. Its focus is on artistic excellence and creative production, but always with new 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.  

Orchestra Nova is also managed by the Nova Music Trust; a flexible chamber orchestra, the group made its professional debut in 2001 at London’s Purcell Room and since then has fulfilled a wide variety of engagements throughout the United Kingdom, having made a steady stream of orchestral and operatic recordings for the Dutton Epoch, Resonus Classics, Guild, Toccata Classics, Naxos, British Guitar Society and Champs Hill labels.

Nova Music Opera celebrated the 2013 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 since had achieved great critical and audience acclaim, having regularly commissioned and premiered important new chamber operas from Charlotte Bray Entanglement (2015), Cecilia McDowall Airborne (2014), Stephen McNeff Prometheus Drown’d (2014), Joseph Phibbs Juliana (2018) and Britten/Luke Styles Awakening Shadow (2021). Nova Music Opera revived Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward in 2015, recording it for Resonus Classics the following year. and also for Resonus, recorded Joseph Phibbs Juliana in 2020.. 

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. 

Nova Music Opera’s current production is Looking West, a specially commissioned music theatre work celebrating the Vaughan Williams' 150th anniversary from composer Julian Philips and librettist Rebecca Hurst. The work premieres at the 2022 Ryedale Festival with other performances in Presteigne and London.