ECM New Series Collection 1995

Released in Germany as a promotional anthology, ECM New Series Collection 1995 gathers 26 passages from a fertile landscape. Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM New Series 1570) lays out a path of travel before us with two themes whose cinematic origin loosens into a larger psychic terrain. Kim Kashkashian’s viola draws the personal through the political until both seem filaments of one buried nerve. Mourning gathers speed and reveals dance inside its dark clothing, while instrumental conversation becomes conversion, turning grief toward an exuberance too scarred to call innocent. That traffic between fragment and world deepens in György Kurtág’s Hommage à R.Sch (ECM New Series 1508), where the dedicatory composer’s miniature forms become living particles. Piano and clarinet gather around the viola in the eponymous Hommage à R.Sch., op. 15d, giving the music sudden visibility. Schumann enters through Märchenbilder Fairy Tale Pictures), op. 113, although arrival proves too stable a…