Meeting his musical hero, Hungarian composer György Kurtág, inspired pianist Víkingur Ólafsson to create his most personal album to date. The Icelander combines works by Kurtág with Icelandic and Hungarian folk songs as well as pieces by Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Adès, Schumann, Birgisson and Kaldalons. Recorded on the Steinway and piano, Ólafsson creates innovative, atmospheric soundscapes. “From Afar” contains three new arrangements and a world premiere recording.
“The narrative arc of this album provides a lot of associative freedom for anyone who is willing to be curious. Víkingur Ólafsson is not only a maître of small program pearls, but also a lover of soft tones. He impressively demonstrates his oscillating in the stepless range of piano and pianissimo. Even if the musical text permits ornamentation, above all trills, it shows how precisely Ólafsson is the master of his expressive possibilities.” – Fono Forum
UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to protect the softer photopolymer from scratches. The combination results in a significantly reduced reflection of the laser light inside the CD and an unrivaled precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with regular CD players. Musically, the sound is strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.
The discs offered by Universal Japan are also MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoded. If you output the digital signal from the digital output of your CD player or the previously ripped data stream of your music server to a corresponding MQA DA converter, you can generate a 24-bit signal with a sampling frequency of up to 352 kHz from the CD data.
