The scene when I arrived at The Bell House last night was radically different that it was on Monday, when I was there for a more-or-less standard indie show with Philly's A Sunny Day in Glasgow. Last night, the floor was filled with chairs (all of which were occupied), and all of Signal - whom I'd just heard up at the Miller on Thursday – was crammed onto the smallish stage.
The occasion was a performance of Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope: an hour long riff on Homer's Odyssey, told from the title character's point of view. Snider wrote Penelope in 2008 with playwright Ellen McLaughlin for string quartet; she later expanded it to an orchestral song cycle performed at Galapagos last May. This was only the second-ever performance, in anticipation of a New Amsterdam release this September.
Aside from Signal's strong playing and Snider's appealing, cinematic orchestration that mixed classical instruments with guitars and electronics, what ultimately sold the work was the presence of Shara Worden who, outside of her usual work with My Brightest Diamond, is becoming familiar in new music circles, with her involvement in last November's The Long Count and the Brooklyn Phil's performance with Bell Orchestre last February. Worden's voice is a thing of wonder: part Gospel mama, part folkie vibrato – with all the confidence of an operatic diva. Throw in some dramatic stage lighting and a back screen projecting images of mountains and sea, and it was all automatic magic. Leave it to Judd and the intrepid peeps over at New Amsterdam to explode all preconceptions of what's possible in a rock club.
Unfortunately, that same element of surprise didn't benefit William Brittelle's Television Landscape, which combined Brittelle's rock diva gyrating (to a pre-recorded vocal track) with jazz and classical textures, fueled by keyboards, horns and traditional rock guitar and drums. As opposed to Penelope, staging this work in a rock club – which Brittelle says was inspired by everything from Prince to Michael Jackson to Debussy – was a risky venture, leaving it exposed to comparison with the acts that usually play there. Who knows, maybe it would have helped to get rid of the seats. (More pics at the Flickr page.) 
