Featured Project
What Belongs to You
An operatic adaptation of Garth Greenwell's acclaimed novel
Winner · 2025 MCANA Award for Best New Opera — Music Critics Association of North America
"The whole essence of opera is excess; the point of it, its necessary condition, is emotion too powerful for speech, emotion that has to explode in song…"
— Garth Greenwell, writing in The Guardian
Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You "tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know."
This manifests as an obsession with a hustler named Mitko, with whom the unnamed narrator begins a long, unstable, and ultimately destructive affair. The story is specific and personal, but the experience Greenwell describes is universal: the search for self and the desire to belong amidst loneliness and enduring heartbreak.
Greenwell falls into a lineage of queer literature that reaches back through Edmund White and Jean Genet to Arthur Rimbaud. His tale is operatic in emotional scale and his writing is inherently musical, in no small part because Greenwell trained as an opera singer before becoming a writer.
"Sometimes I feel that I'm writing into the shape made by a musical phrase. I often strive to feel the energy of a sentence in the same way a singer feels breath."
— Garth Greenwell
David T. Little's score looks back to look forward, channeling the white heat of Britten's Rimbaud setting, Les Illuminations, the melancholy of Dowland, Monteverdi, Schubert, and vanitas paintings, and the startling color of Gerard Grisey's Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.
What Belongs to You seeks to capture timeless pain in a new frame, as Greenwell's text is distilled to its poetic core and presented anew as music-theatre.
LISTEN & WATCH
The studio recording of What Belongs to You is available now from Bright Shiny Things.
Get the Album →PRESS
"Alan Pierson's 16-piece Alarm Will Sound chamber ensemble… seem to be able to handle anything. And they do."
— Gramophone
"[David T. Little's] idiom here has echoes of the operas of Britten and Monteverdi without sounding derivative. The music is tender, lyric, and full of heartbreak … there is a beautiful spectrum of color and intensity in the score."
— Parterre Box
"The music is compelling from the very first moment … Every moment of What Belongs to You is rapturously musical. The libretto and the music so perfectly complement one another. It's almost as if they've always been paired."
— Cultural Attaché
"The chamber scoring is carefully judged, with Alarm Will Sound creating a sound world that is clear but seldom comfortable. Karim Sulayman gives a finely concentrated performance … with an unflinching focus on the narrator's vulnerability."
— BBC Music Magazine
PERFORMANCES
World Premiere: September 26 & 28, 2024
Modlin Center for the Arts, The University of Richmond
Preview: February 11, 2022
Washington University in Saint Louis