WHAT BELONGS TO YOU | LIMELIGHT EDITORS CHOICE - REVIEW

David T Little: What Belongs To You (Karim Sulayman, Alarm Will Sound, Alan Pierson)

by: Alexandra Coghlan | August, 2026

David T Little’s latest piece of music-theatre arrives on disc with the seal of approval of the Music Critics’ Association of North America, named their Best New Opera of 2025. And it’s hard to argue with the verdict. Adapting Garth Greenwell’s novel of the same name, Little’s work is 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 at the University of Richmond. 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.

Little’s score demands much and gets more from Pierson’s tight ensemble – now shimmering and tremulous in the initial sexual encounter, now humid and busy with insect-life in a flashback to a hot summer night in childhood, now lashing out in brass and percussion, less interested in harmonic challenge than textural play.

Sulayman (for whom the work was written) has a voice you listen straight through: a vessel for text and emotion, tonally uninflected, anonymous. Here it’s exactly the translucent glass we need, a narrator in the tradition of Britten whose very neutrality reveals multitudes. Will the project work with another singer? It’s a piece that deserves the stagings to find out.