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 word. Its vignettes emerge from Kurtág’s afterimage, each microscopically tuned to affection.

Keith Jarrett’s traversal of Händel’s keyboard suites (ECM New Series 1530) offers a lucid counterweight. The recitative-shaped opening of Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427 carries the vocal Händel in embryonic form before the Fuga opens its intricate gates. The pianist’s telescoped dynamics give ornament ethical weight, as every flourish answers to proportion. Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (ECM New Series 1523), represented here by three selections in Herbert Henck’s grave illumination, carries inwardness past the edge of utterance. Mompou’s “silent music” inhabits the soul’s inner ear, where sound waits inside solitude for the touch that will give it contour. Henck allows the notes to hover at the fringe of incarnation.

Sacred language assumes more labyrinthine form in Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s reading of Messiaen’s Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (ECM New Series 1494). The French composer’s communicable language encodes Aquinas into the organ, converting theology into an audible grammar whose meaning remains partly sealed. Part VII places density in the upper register, where sin becomes molecular and descends through imagined soil. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Speciálník (ECM New Series 1504) approaches inscription from another century. In natali domini advances in luminous block chords touched by chromatic ornament, while Pulcherrima Rosa unfurls a melodic current whose anonymity feels sovereign. The Prague manuscript becomes a living archive under these voices, crossing five centuries without surrendering its obscurity.

Giya Kancheli occupies the anthology’s most desolate interior. In Exil (ECM New Series 1535), the Paul Celan setting Einmal rises from an alto flute invocation that arrests the heart before Maacha Deubner’s unaffected soprano enters. Tapped bows and glassy harmonics place enormous force inside a nearly vacant field. The related Abii ne viderem (ECM New Series 1510) expands this monastic material into orchestral mass. Staccato eruptions are joined by abysses of silence until a full statement arrives, weighted by the piano’s pulse.

The cello works on Patrick Demenga and Thomas Demenga’s 12 Hommages A Paul Sacher (ECM New Series 1520-21) transform a patron’s name into generative code. The Sacher hexachord is an alphabet evolving into timbre. Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher gives the dedication a tensile intimacy, with conflict touching agreement within one speaking body. Luciano Berio’s Les Mots Sont Allés opens modest notes into fractal agency, language departing only to discover further chambers inside the instrument. A different dialogue animates Robyn Schulkowsky and Nils Petter Molvær’s Hastening Westward (ECM New Series 1564). In “Pier And Ocean II,” foregrounded cymbals create an aerial plane for Molvær’s trumpet, while deeper impacts lend the scene sanctity freed from doctrine. Percussion supplies a shifting anatomy; trumpet becomes the consciousness passing through it, visible to itself for one impossible instant.

A program dedicated entirely to Sándor Veress (ECM New Series 1555), performed by Camerata Bern with Heinz Holliger, is another homage. Veress taught Kurtág and wrote the Passacaglia Concertante for Holliger, so inheritance here passes in genuine form. A plucked string drops an idea into depth, and viola-rich currents carry its consequences outward as Holliger’s oboe burns through the structure with intimate authority. His own Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (ECM New Series 1540) divides that authority between folklore and verbal fracture. Alb-Chehr recounts a cowherd’s ghostly encounter through playful color shadowed by fatal knowledge, while Beiseit lets Robert Walser’s words dictate their own arrhythmias. Countertenor, clarinet, accordion, and double bass inhabit an intimacy sharpened by the recording site, a psychiatric institute whose walls seem to have retained every unsounded syllable. Und ging briefly turns lyrical, yet lyricism here bears the delicate unease of a door found open in a room no one remembers entering.

Across this rare compilation, the New Series ideal emerges as an art of attunement to what has not fully entered the world. ECM’s celebrated spaciousness consequently feels less acoustic than ontological. These recordings suggest that consciousness may itself be a form of chamber music, each self sounding only because another presence has drawn a bow across its silence.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this disc to my attention.