With the recording of Sergei Rachmaninov’s 1st Symphony and his Symphonic Dances, the Philadelphia Orchestra and its chief conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin start their cycle of symphonic works by the Russian composer, which will be complete in the anniversary year 2023 (150th birthday). The Philadelphia Orchestra has always had a special relationship with Rachmaninoff’s music: he himself entrusted the orchestra with some of his compositions for the first performance, and the symphonic dances presented here were even dedicated to the Philadelphia Orchestra and its chief conductor at the time. The album deliberately combines the first symphony with this last composition by Rachmaninoff, which repeatedly takes up the musical material of the early work.
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 unmatched 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.
