Odyssey review – Jonathan Dove cantata gives powerful voice to refugee experience

Jonathan Dove’s new work, commissioned by Bristol Beacon, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and City of Bristol Choir, celebrates the courage and resilience of those forced to flee strife-torn countries and seek sanctuary elsewhere. Set for tenor and soprano soloists, with choral and orchestral forces, Odyssey takes the form of a dramatic cantata and, by giving it the name associated with the heroism of the Greek Odysseus, the intentions of Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton are clear.

Incorporating words from the testimony of those who have survived the bitter experience, they bring into sharp focus the plight of refugees and the displaced, for whom the hell in which they eventually find themselves is nevertheless better than the hell from which they came. When this project was first conceived in 2016 the phrase “hostile environment” was already being bandied about, but it could hardly have been envisaged that the government’s Rwanda bill would be now be before parliament.

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Under conductor David Ogden, Odyssey’s strength was that – often in the simplest of ways – it evoked the terror, despair and squalor of the journeys undertaken, with only occasional glimmers of light. Some phrases became indelibly imprinted: “arbitrary cruelty”, the treatment of people as “human litter”. And part of what was painful was the knowledge that, during the very hour of this performance, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were in exactly such horrific circumstances.

As the young man urged by his desperate mother (Francesca Chiejina) to flee the marauding forces destroying their homes, tenor Thando Mjandana embodied the plight of all such individuals with a quiet nobility. His voice carried well against the full power of the combined choirs, with the experience of the City of Bristol Choir, the freshness of sound of the Bristol Youth Choir, and the character of the Bristol Windrush Reggae Choir all bringing a welcome variety of tone when heard alone. The resonance of the Bournemouth orchestra’s playing underpinned the whole piece, as descriptive of the perils of the sea – the shudder-inducing percussion notably effective – as of the calm of the heart’s home, for which the refugee will always yearn.

Given the bare minimum of staging here, allowing words their primacy, the nature of Odyssey is open to a more operatic treatment. As an exercise in consciousness-raising, it deserves to be taken up again and again. Part of a Be Kind Bristol day of events, it was prefaced here with songs by children from two Bristol schools of sanctuary, and from the rapper MoYah, himself a refugee from the civil war in Mozambique, whose message was a potent one of hope.