The Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder has fulfilled a long-cherished dream with this project. Five closely connected conductors and “their” orchestras each play one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous piano concertos live with him at the Vienna Musikverein. Rudolf Buchbinder has had a long musical relationship and friendship with everyone involved. Four of the concerts could take place in Vienna, the concert with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Christian Thielemann took place in Dresden. The result is an unbelievable recording of the piano concertos in an absolute dream line-up. You can hear Buchbinder with the Staatskapelle Dresden and Christian Thielemann, the Munich Philharmonic and Valery Gergiev, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Andris Nelsons, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mariss Jansons (in his last recording) and the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Muti.
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 rather cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to protect the softer photopolymer from scratching. The combination results in a significantly reduced reflection of the laser light inside the CD and an unequaled precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with normal CD players. Musically, the result is a sound that is strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.
The discs offered by Universal Japan are also MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoded. Anyone who outputs the digital signal from the digital output of their CD player or the previously ripped data stream from their music server to a corresponding MQA-DA converter can generate a 24-bit signal with a sampling frequency of up to 352 kHz from the CD data.
