Yannick Nézet-Séguin & Chamber Orchestra of Europe Brahms: The Symphonies (3 UHQCD)

On the occasion of Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin's tour of Japan, this Deutsche Grammophon release was released as UHQCD by Universal Japan in June 2024.
Together with the "Chamber Orchestra of Europe", with whom Nézet-Séguin has played every summer in the German spa town of Baden-Baden for over a decade and who are known for their joint Beethoven symphony cycle, all four Brahms symphonies were recorded in 2022.
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. UHQCDs, unlike conventional CDs, are not pressed from polycarbonate, but cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. To protect the softer photopolymer from scratching, another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied. The combination results in a significantly reduced reflection of the laser light inside the CD and an unrivalled 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 additionally 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.
While Universal Music Japan's first UHQCD series relied on DSD data from previous SHM-SACD releases, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now being released with increasing popularity. Typically, the master tapes of the Universal Archive are re-converted to DSD and then post-processed with the appropriate MQA encoder. Thus, the UHQCDs are ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not have a SACD player.

Musicians:

• Chamber Orchestra of Europe
• Yannick Nezet-Seguin, conductor

Selections:

Disc 1
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No.1 in C Minor, Op.68
Disc 2
Symphony No.2 in D Major, Op.73
Disc 3
Symphony No.3 in F, Op.90
Symphony No.4 In E Minor, Op.98