Loved ‘The Odyssey?’ Continue the Journey With These Performances
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has captivated audiences with its sweeping retelling of Homer’s epic, but one of the film’s most surprising stars may be its sound. Composer Ludwig Göransson built the score around reconstructed ancient Greek instruments, including the aulos and lyre, to evoke a world that feels both timeless and startlingly new. The result is a soundtrack that has sparked widespread curiosity about ancient music and the stories that inspired it.
If you left the theater wanting more myths, more voyages, and more of those evocative historical sounds, UMS’s 26/27 season offers several performances that pick up where The Odyssey leaves off. Check out five presentations that invite you deeper into the worlds of mythology, seafaring adventure, and centuries-old musical traditions:
When I Saw the Sea
Jan 29-30, 2027 // Power Center
Present day storytelling that honors resilience and survival.
In The Odyssey, the sea is both danger and the route home, and Odysseus’s identity is shaped by crossing it. In When I Saw the Sea, the open water is a glimpse of freedom for a group of migrant women, and the possibility of a life beyond their current exploitation.
For Lebanese director and choreographer Ali Chahrour, art is inseparable from the present moment. His works elevate true personal stories of families, mothers, and working women, which he describes as creating “new heroic figures of everyday society.”
When I Saw the Sea dissolves the boundaries between dance, music, and theater, weaving Arabic and Ethiopian melodies into a powerful act of remembrance and defiance. Live music includes instrumentation that draws from ancient roots in the Levant, including the buzuq (long-necked fretted lute) and mijwiz (double-pipe, single-reed woodwind instrument).
Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas
Sun Feb 7, 2027 // Hill Auditorium
Another great Trojan epic, told through one of opera’s great masterpieces.
Love, duty, fate, and loss. If The Odyssey tells the story of the long journey home, Dido and Aeneas explores the journey that comes after.
Based on Virgil’s Aeneid, the opera follows the Trojan hero Aeneas after the fall of Troy. He arrives in Carthage, where he falls in love with Queen Dido before destiny calls him onward to found what will become Rome. It is one of Western music’s most enduring mythological tales, and one that directly continues the world Homer created.
This performance features tenor and U-M alumnus Nicholas Phan, and stars mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, whose interpretation of Dido’s heartbreakingly beautiful closing lament, “When I am laid in Earth,” is particularly masterful:
Played on period instruments by Il Pomo d’Oro, one of the world’s leading early music ensembles, this concert allows audiences to hear the music as listeners would have in Purcell’s own time, with transparent textures and uniquely expressive colors that modern orchestras cannot replicate.
Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony
Sat Feb 13, 2027 // Hill Auditorium
The ocean becomes a metaphor for humanity’s greatest journey.
Not every sea voyage involves monsters and shipwrecks.
Inspired by Walt Whitman’s poetry, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s monumental A Sea Symphony transforms the ocean into a symbol of exploration, courage, and the search for meaning. Like Homer’s epic, the symphony asks timeless questions: What lies beyond the horizon? What do we discover when we venture into the unknown? And how does every voyage change us?
The mighty UMS Choral Union, soaring vocal soloists Christine Goerke and Norman Garrett, and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra will create a musical experience in Hill Auditorium that is expansive and expressive at a cinematic scale.
The Mad Lover
Wed Mar 17, 2027 // Rackham Auditorium
Hear the sounds of the 17th century as they were originally intended.
One of the most distinctive aspects of The Odyssey soundtrack is its commitment to historical sound, using ancient instruments to immerse audiences in another place and time.
Performing music from their album The Mad Lover, violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and lutenist Thomas Dunford similarly transport listeners to an earlier era, in this case the Baroque period with its melancholy, longing, and emotional extremes. Heightened by the exuberance and wild abandon common to the music composed during this period, this concert weaves a different sort of narrative of yearning and loss.
Like Göransson’s score to The Odyssey, The Mad Lover pays homage to the past through historical instruments and techniques that enhance storytelling, character, and atmosphere for an entirely different listening experience.
Bonus Pick: The Cleveland Orchestra
Fri Sep 25, 2026 // Hill Auditorium (Opening Night!)
Ancient myth meets grand orchestral sound.
The first presentation of the 26/27 season opens with Liszt’s Orpheus, a symphonic poem inspired by one of mythology’s great musician heroes.
Liszt focuses on Orpheus as a symbol of music’s power to bring beauty, compassion, and healing. With its luminous orchestral colors, especially the prominent harp writing, Orpheus unfolds as a graceful, meditative work that celebrates the transformative power of art.
Love great music, theater, and dance?
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