What Belongs to You wins 2025 Award for Best New Opera

What Belongs to You, with libretto and music by David T. Little, is the winner of the 2025 Award for Best New Opera, conferred by the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA). The award, which recognizes both musical and theatrical excellence, is given annually to an operatic world premiere presented in North America the previous calendar year.

The Best New Opera Award is determined by an Awards Committee of distinguished music critics. It reflects the overarching mission of MCANA to recognize distinctive achievements and, through its web publication Classical Voice North America, to communicate the richness of musical life in the U.S. and Canada at a time when classical music coverage in traditional print media is shrinking.

What Belongs to You, for tenor and sinfonietta, was premiered on September 26, 2024 at the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond, with Mark Morris directing and Karim Sulayman singing the lead role. Alan Pierson conducted Alarm Will Sound.

The work is based on author and cultural critic Garth Greenwell‘s eponymous 2016 novel, which “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.” Greenwell’s novel won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

The opera follows a long and tumultuous relationship, drawing on universal themes such as the search for oneself, the desire to belong, loneliness, and heartbreak. It looks back to look forward, taking inspiration in mysterious, erotic, and devotional music of Britten, Dowland, Monteverdi, Valentini, Schubert, and Grisey, and progresses in a series of distinct images which allow the meaning to gradually accumulate. Together, these allow it to feel both contemporary and connected to the past.

The premiere of What Belongs to You was received with great acclaim and garnered a feature in The New York Times. Opera Magazine praised the opera, stating that “Little often pushes the boundaries of a singer’s range… [and]Sulayman, for whom this role was created, ran the gamut from sweet major-mode lyricism in the aria ‘Kiss me’ to the violent rage stirred up by the death of the character’s homophobic father.” In his publication Night After Night, writer Steve Smith said he “was deeply moved by this ravishing, ambiguous, and frankly erotic creation.”

In response to winning the award, composer David T. Little said:
“What Belongs to You was a passion project from the start; a work I just had to write. To have such a work recognized with an award like this is, first and foremost, deeply meaningful. But that it was also created for and with such an exceptional cohort of dear friends and collaborators makes it doubly so. I share this award with all of them. The artists and supporters who collectively willed What Belongs to You into existence: Alan Pierson, Karim Sulayman, Mark Morris, Maile Okamura, Paul Brohan, Nancy Umanoff, Gavin Chuck, Annie Toth, and the extraordinary musicians of Alarm Will Sound; Linda H. and Richard N. Claytor, Ph.D., and Andrew Martin-Weber; everyone at Boosey & Hawkes and Primo Artists; my parents, and my partner Eileen Mack; and of course, Garth Greenwell, whose trust in allowing me to adapt his work has meant the world to me.”

Future performances of What Belongs to You are being planned in the United States and Europe, as is a recording on Cantaloupe Music.

Photo: David Welch

A natural musical storyteller with “a knack for overturning musical conventions” (The New York Times), composer David T. Little is known for stage, concert, and screen works permeated with eclectic influences and the power of the unexpected. Little readily probes the deep corners of human psychology, invoking religious, political, historical, spiritual, and social themes as pathways for exploring the human condition. He has drawn acclaim for operas including Dog Days, JFK, and the comedy Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera (all with libretto by Royce Vavrek), as well as his opera Soldier Songs. His broad catalog speaks to the mix of light and dark that we experience in life, unafraid to invoke the mythical, bewitching, disturbing, surreal, or comedic.

What Belongs to You (2024) comes on the heels of Little’s theatrical choral work, SIN-EATER, which premiered in Philadelphia by The Crossing and Bergamot Quartet in the fall of 2023, conducted by Donald Nally. Based on the ancient practice of paying the poor to ritualistically “eat” the sins of the rich—allowing the privileged to move onto the next life cleansed of their guilty deeds—The Wall Street Journal praised the work’s “shattering impact.”

Little’s Black Lodge, nominated for Best Opera Recording in the 2024 GRAMMY® Awards, is a metal-infused film opera drawing on the complex mythologies of William S. Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, and David Lynch, with a libretto by celebrated poet Anne Waldman and performances by Timur and the Dime Museum and Isaura String Quartet. Black Lodge premiered by Beth Morrison Projects at Opera Philadelphia, and the soundtrack was released by Cantaloupe Music. It is a 2024 recipient of the Music Theater Now international prize.

Among his other key compositions are several large scale instrumental works, including the “ghost play” Haunt of Last Nightfall for percussion quartet, and AGENCY, a companion string quartet about the nature of choice and knowledge, in which “episodes of crushing sonic violence coexist with oases of serene lyrical beauty for an overall sense of smoldering, luxuriant noise” (The New York Times). Yet other works explore life’s many highs: the ecstatic, almost manic energy of Spalding Gray, the Iggy Pop-inspired “joyous honk” of raw power, the wry humor of Speak Softly, the fond nostalgia of 1986, or the moonstruck aches of first love in JFK and What Belongs to You.

Little set the tone for his operatic work with the 2006 premiere of Soldier Songs, drawing praise for “the imaginative way he draws on his varied musical interests to produce arresting and coherent works” (Musical America). Based on extensive interviews with military veterans, the work has been performed by Los Angeles Opera, Atlanta Opera, San Diego Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, and by Beth Morrison Projects at the Holland Festival, among others. A film adaptation of Soldier Songs was later produced for the Opera Philadelphia Channel, earning a 2022 GRAMMY® Award nomination, a 2022 Opera America Award, and a nomination from the International Opera Awards.

Little’s many compositions for solo performer or small ensemble often include ghostly or spiritual themes. Ghostlight, commissioned for Eighth Blackbird by The Kennedy Center, looks to surrealist art and fairy tales for their unspoken lessons, while dress in magic amulets, dark, from My feet is a meditation on Christ on the cross commissioned by The Crossing and International Contemporary Ensemble. Still other works draw from literary sources or history, such as The Crocus Palimpsest, a Samuel Beckett-inspired work for solo cello composed for Matt Haimovitz. Little’s works for orchestra and large ensemble have by comparison often focused on people and places: The Conjured Life, a centennial tribute to Lou Harrison; CHARM, a celebration of city life commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; and Haunted Topography, a meditation on the connection between location and loss.

Little is the founding artistic director and former drummer for the amplified chamber ensemble, Newspeak, which explores the relationship of music and politics, while confronting head-on the boundaries between the classical and rock traditions. They have released four commercial recordings, with a fifth on the way.

Little has been commissioned by the world’s most prestigious institutions and performers, including recent projects for The Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater new works program, the Kennedy Center, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, New World Symphony, London Sinfonietta, The Crossing, Kronos Quartet, and Beth Morrison Projects. His music has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Holland Festival, LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Opéra de Montréal, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the LA Philharmonic. Little’s recorded catalog includes over 20 commercial releases on such labels as New Amsterdam Records, Pentatone, Sono Luminus, Bright Shiny Things, and Cantaloupe Music.

David T. Little is a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award. His music is published by Boosey & Hawkes.

Music Critics Association of North America