Rudolf Serkin - The Lost Tapes: Beethoven Sonatas "Waldstein" & "Appassionata"

RUDOLF SERKIN - THE LOST TAPES: BEETHOVEN SONATAS "WALDSTEIN" & "APPASSIONATA"

TITLE

Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major “Waldstein” Op. 53
1. Allegro con brio
2. Introduzione.Adagio molto - attacca
3. Rondo.Allegretto moderato - Prestissimo
Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor “Appassionata” Op. 57
4. Allegro assai
5. Andante con moto - attacca
6. Allegro,ma non troppo - Presto

Pianist Rudolf Serkin recorded the Beethoven piano sonatas "Waldstein" and "Appassionata" in 1986 and 1989, but they were only released on the occasion of his 120th birthday in 2023. Due to his progressive illness, the artist was unable to release the original tapes at the time, which is why they lay dormant in the archive for decades. Now his daughter has given her consent to the release by Deutsche Grammophon and has also written personal words for the accompanying booklet.

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 the softer photopolymer for scratch protection. The combination results in significantly reduced reflection of laser light inside the CD and an unmatched precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with standard CD players. Musically, the result is a sound image 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 from your music server to a corresponding MQA-DA converter, you can generate a 24-bit signal with up to 352 Khz sampling frequency from the CD data.

While Universal Music Japan's first UHQCD series relied on the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, with increasing popularity, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now appearing. Typically, the Universal Archive master tapes are re-converted to DSD for this purpose 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 own an SACD player.