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
"[Alarm Will Sound] seems to be able to handle anything. And they do."
— Gramophone
"What Belongs to You is the most riveting, soul-shaking contemporary opera recording since the 2019 release of Ellen Reid's equally brilliant and award-winning chamber opera, Prism… Little's music is extraordinary… so expressive, imaginative, and gripping that it raises the operatic experience to a level that only great music can do. …Not only is the recording definitive; it is essential."
— San Francisco Classical Voice
"Every now and then a new opera comes along that shakes your world, reminding you of the power and emotional depths that can be attained by this most complex of artforms. David T. Little's What Belongs to You is just such a work… Even at its most traumatic, the music retains an inner beauty… Karim Sulayman's central performance is visceral, fluid, and richly poetic… Alarm Will Sound give a performance that crackles with energy under Alan Pierson, and the recording is thrillingly immediate. Be in no doubt, this is a major work by a composer at the top of his game. As such, it demands to be heard."
— Musical America
"Daring brilliance… unforgettable… the impact is extraordinary… compelling in its freshness and surprise… Under Alan Pierson, the Alarm Will Sound ensemble… gives a superbly precise and gusty performance. In sum: a gem."
— Opera
"at once original and deeply allusive, magpie-eclectic and absolutely itself. Tender and confronting, it roughs you up while giving you a lesson in music-theatre. Not bad for an opera with a cast of one… The recording by conductor Alan Pierson, chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound and tenor Karim Sulayman, is live, taken at the world premiere performance… The live aspect is crucial; without hearing Sulayman's carefully-paced account, his vocal stamina, you might doubt the work's viability. As it is, it remains a ferociously demanding piece – a monodrama in the tradition of Erwartung, Voix Humaine, Twice Through The Heart but more so: longer, still more brutal, trauma exposed with forensic fascination… roars with pain and rage."
— Limelight
"tender, lyric, and full of heartbreak"
— Parterre Box
"every moment … is rapturously musical"
— Cultural Attaché
On Sulayman: "a finely concentrated performance"
— 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