Nimbus: Technology Serving the Arts - Tapa dura

Nimbus is that rarity of a company which combines business vision, artistic talent and integrity and far-sighted technical innovation.
Count Numa Labinsky (also known as the singer Shura Gerhman) met his future partner, Michael Reynolds, by chance on a train and a 'family' was born, which was soon to embrace Michael's brother, Gerald and later, Adrian Farmer and Dr Jonathan Halliday. First in Birmingham, later in a beautiful country house on the banks of the River Wye near Monmouth, the 'family' created the famous Nimbus record label and CD manufacturing company, which grew in twenty years from a yearly turnover of a few thousand pounds to over thirty million pounds, as well as providing seven hundred jobs.
Nimbus came to set the highest technical and cultural standards for the classical music industry. As a recording company it rediscovered such great artists as Shura Cherkassky, Oscar Shumsky, Guller and Vlado Perlemuter, encouraged new artists and orchestras and launched the astonishingly successful Prima Voce CD reincarnations of the great voices of the early twentieth century, such as Caruso and Chaliapin. Nimbus was also the first CD manufacturer in Britain and the second in Europe, and later set up a plant in the United States. Now it is leading the hunt to develop low cost video-CD for the twenty-first century.
How Count Labinsky and his team achieved all this makes a fascinating story, not least when the author describes how they fell into but narrowly escaped the clutches of the dreaded Captain Maxwell. Extensively illustrated with photographs from the Nimbus archives, the book will appeal to music lovers and students of business innovation alike.