HgCapital has announced that it has agreed to sell classical music publisher Boosey & Hawkes to Imagem Music for approximately £126 million. Boosey & Hawkes controls the rights to more than 116,000 works of music and choreography from many of the world’s most famous classical composers, including Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten and Prokofieff.

Image Music was created by Dutch fund ABP, the world's third largest pension fund, and CP Masters BV upon their purchase of UMG's publishing assets. Those assets acquired, which include Zomba UK, Rondor UK, 19 Music and part of the BBC catalog, were sold by UMG in order to gain European Commission approval of its acquisition of BMG Music Publishing.

As the Times points out, the acquisition sets a reference price for the Chrysalis publishing assets that are up for sale. Boosey sold at 9.7 times net publisher's share. Applying that multiple to Chrysalis Music would value it at 172p per share. Chrysalis currently trades at 138p per share.