Opera @ Augustana: "Odysseys on Land and Sea"

Opera@Augustana and the Augustana Chamber Orchestra will present "Odysseys on Land and Sea," a program of three British musical offerings of the early 20th century.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17, and 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 18.

The performance opens with Gerald Finzi's "A Severn Rhapsody," an orchestral fantasy inspired by a poem of Rupert Brooke, expressing a longing for home while living abroad. 

Next will be a theatrical presentation of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Songs of Travel," a selection of poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's collection of the same name, in which the poet's cherished relationship with home is fraught with an equally strong wanderlust. 

The final performance will be Vaughan Williams' opera "Riders to the Sea," from the Irish playwright J.M. Synge's tragic play about the perils and poignancies of living by the sea.  

It was first performed in 1904 by the Irish National Theater Society in Dublin.

"Riders to the Sea"  is based on a tale Synge heard in the Aran Islands. It won critical acclaim as one of dramatic literature’s greatest one-act plays. The play centers on an old woman who has lost to the sea all the male members of her family except the last of her six sons.