Penelope
Ticketing packages:
This event is included in the the following package/s:
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Performers:
Ellen McLaughlin – Lyrics
Georgie Darvidis – Voice
Four Winds Festival Ensemble -
Repertoire:
PENELOPE
The Stranger with the Face of a Man I Loved – This Is What You’re Like – Nausicaa – Circe and the Hanged Man – Home – Dead Friend – Calypso – Baby Teeth, Bones, and Bullets – As He Looks Out to Sea
Sarah Kirkland Snider
Penelope
Featuring Georgie Darvidis
Inspired by The Odyssey, Penelope is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home.
A woman’s husband appears at her door after an absence of twenty years, suffering from brain damage. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads to him from Homer’s work, and in the journey of that epic poem, finds a way into her former husband’s memory and the terror and trauma of war.
Haunted, glitchy, bewildering and subtle, Penelope occupies a nether-land between richly orchestrated indie rock and straight-up chamber music, moving organically from moments of elegiac strings-and-harp reflection to dusky post-rock textures with drums, guitars and electronics, all directed by a strong sense of melody and a craftsman’s approach to songwriting.
Alternately melancholic, agitated and poignant, this would be the musical offspring if Britten’s Sea Interludes met Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, channeling the piercing melancholy of a Chopin nocturne and spacious rhythms of minimalism.
“Groundbreaking…one of the most acclaimed song cycles of the last decade…What makes Penelope so gently devastating is the way Snider precisely captures the text: alternately desolate, agitated, or coldly detached. Musical syntax matters less than the complex web of loss, recrimination, and self-understanding evoked.”