Penelope is a song cycle that straddles the poorly defined but productive border between contemporary classical and indie rock. Snider's musical language includes intricate string writing as well as evocative, post-minimalist shimmers of vibraphone and percussion, and urgent electric guitar and drum kit. Holding it all together is the distinctive voice of Shara Worden, who records indie rock under the name My Brightest Diamond but who has become the go-to singer for this sort of alternative classical music. (You can hear her in the Clogs record The Creatures In the Garden of Lady Walton, for example, as well as several songs in Sufjan Stevens's catalog.

The story is a strikingly timeless and timely one. A woman opens her door to find that her husband has returned after 20 years in an unnamed war — with amnesia. With no sense of who he is, or who she is, he becomes a kind of tabula rasa; and as she waits for him to rediscover his own identity, she reads to him from Homer's Odyssey. The parallels between her situation and that of Penelope, waiting for Ulysses to return, are the stuff of poetry, and the playwright Ellen McLaughlin's text… read more »