NRV’s founder and director is Bruce Saunders. A choral scholar at Cambridge and an experienced recitalist and oratorio soloist, he performs regularly with baroque orchestras using period instruments in London and elsewhere, and has appeared as a soloist with many London choirs and choral societies. Active in early music in Bristol and Portsmouth since the early 1970s, he moved to London in 1984 and drew together a group of friends interested in exploring the early music repertoire.

NRV is now a group of about eighteen singers. Since their first concert in March 1987 in the church of St Mary the Virgin Mortlake, the choir, whose name was chosen to echo something of the ars nova style of renaissance polyphony, have given more than fifty concerts exploring the music of composers from Dufay, Ockeghem and Josquin to Gesualdo and Monteverdi. NRV’s repertoire explores European rather than English music. This wider range of styles requires a willingness to move away from the soaring legato with which English Tudor music is customarily performed, in order to learn how to respond vocally in new ways to the enormous variety of demands made by the music of this fascinating period.