Players & Singers

La Nuova Musica, founded in 2007, has rapidly established itself as one of the most distinctive voices in the early music field.

Under the direction of founder and Artistic Director, David Bates, LNM strives to reveal new aspects of familiar repertoire, focussing on works for voice and instrumentalists, through dynamic performances of both masterpieces and lesser-known works from across the Baroque and Classical periods, alongside new commissions.

Equally at home performing Monteverdi through to Mozart and beyond, LNM has appeared in prestigious festivals and concert halls across Europe, including La Seine Musicale Paris, the Göttingen International Handel Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, the Steffani Festival in Hannover and festivals across England including the BBC Proms.

LNM is heard performing in major London venues, with a regular series of concerts at the Wigmore Hall and other larger scale events at St Martin in the Fields. As a regular participant in the London Handel Festival they have performed eight of his operas, and in 2024 will give his Arianna in Creta in the church where he was a parishioner, St George’s Hanover Square. In 2024 LNM will appear for the first time in the Grange Festival in a run of performances of Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea.

Alongside regular performances of works by better-known composers LNM seeks to shed light on repertoire that has been languishing in libraries for the past 300 years, breathing life into many forgotten compositions, such as Conti’s final opera Issipile.

While its core repertoire lies between 1600 – 1800, LNM has also commissioned living composers to write new works to sit alongside their specialist repertoire working closely with Nico Muhly, Luke Styles, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Edmund Finnis and Cassandra Miller. Further commissions are planned with Luke Styles (again) and Tom Coult.

LNM has recorded extensively for Harmonia Mundi, and Pentatone. LNM’s latest disc, Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, released in Autumn 2023 has gathered outstanding reviews and awards across Europe. BBC R3’s CD Review in making it their Recording of the week said “the way it zings off the page bristling with dramatic life and energy from the first bars, and with a range of voices and imaginative instrumental accompaniment, fills it with incident and colour” Gramophone in listing it a one of its recording of the year commented “this theatrical, big bones performance….shows Bates and his ensemble at their best”

Earlier releases on the Pentatone label have included Handel’s Unsung Heroes, where the spotlight is shone on the obligato instrumentalists who duet virtuosically alongside their singing counterparts in masterpieces from Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare, Agrippina and Ariodante. “This is a stunning collection of Handel opera numbers. For originality, risk-taking and erudition, it towers above its predecessors… The project is a heroic achievement for all involved.” BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Month *****

“La Nuova Musica….as lively a collection of instrumentalists and singers as the world offers” The Times