Kabuki Syndrome

Kabuki is one of Japan's typical theater genres, and it is still very popular today. It was created in the 17th century by a woman. As its popularity grew, it quickly became an entirely male art. Music plays a vital role in Kabuki. It sets the time and place of event; it expressed the actors' sentiments, for example. There are two types of plays in Kabuki: epic plays which recount the feats and deeds of the samurai class, and a more popular repertoire recounting the lives of the peasant and merchant classes. As for the Jiuta-Mai, it is the classical chamber music style of Japan. Before the 17th century, the voice was predominant, but afterward, in particular during the Edo period, the instrumental part became longer, taking a place thus far occupied by the voice. The Jiuta ensemble, also called Sankyoku (meaning "three instruments"), is composed of the shamisen, the koto, and the shakuhachi. This high-quality CD offers three excerpts from different Kabuki plays (of three different styles) and two works from the Jiuta-Mai repertoire. All these pieces are more than 200 hundred years old.

The Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble is – as the name implies – based in Stockholm, and consists of five of the city's leading musicians. Project-based and often inviting guest performers, the SSE is known for its imaginative programmes built around a particular event or concept and bringing together music from various genres and eras. For its first album on BIS the ensemble has taken Brett Dean’s Voices of Angels as their point of departure, a work scored for the same forces as Schubert’s ‘Trout quintet’ and inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s first two Duino Elegies: ‘Angels (it’s said) are often unable to tell whether they move amongst the living or the dead.’