NMC Recordings

NMC Recordings is a record label with charitable status, devoted to the promotion of contemporary classical music from the British Isles.
Their catalogue of more than 250 recordings features major international artists, established figures and new voices. In 2015 they received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Leslie Boosey Award for their “outstanding contribution to the furthering of contemporary music in Britain”.

NMC was conceived after Imogen Holst and Colin Matthews set up the Holst Foundation with the aim of supporting the work of living composers. In 1987, Colin Matthews proposed that recordings of significant concerts of new music were an ideal way of reaching a larger audience. The Holst Foundation has been a major funder of NMC from its inception.

In 2015 the copyright to Holst’s work ran out meaning that the Foundation no longer received income from performances and cannot offer grants. NMC now relies on charitable donations to continue their work.
NMC has a reputation for innovation and independence, quality and originality. They seek to challenge, believe that new music is a dynamic and engaging art and make no secret of promoting recordings that demand the listener’s full attention.

Fun Fact

NMC is an abbreviation for “New Music Cassettes”, which refers to the intended main means of packaging its recordings when they began.