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.

An unnamed American teaches English in Sofia. An encounter with sex-worker Mitko launches a relationship of mutual exploitation – toxic, sometimes abusive – that only ends with Mitko’s terminal diagnosis. As it progresses, the narrator contemplates his childhood and estranged, homophobic father, his formative gay experiences and the shame, guilt and self-loathing that underpin his own damaged identity and sexuality.

Greenwell’s prose is compressed by the composer himself into its verbal essence – taking phrases and rhythms as well as its plot from the original. It mostly works, though sometimes the author’s descriptive detail – “your tongue antiseptic with gin”, “Affecting an air of hypermasculinity and criminality” – can seem fussy, self-consciously literary, when sung. Little gets round this with episodes of melodrama, orchestration briefly stepping into the foreground while song collapses into speech.

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.

It’s easy to be distracted by the clever, allusive quality of a score where love arrives to the ecstatic echo of West Side Story and desire to the cholera-laced breath of Death in Venice, a rent-boy speaks in a corrupted Bach chorale, Dowland haunts rejection, and which ends with the fatal churn of Schubert’s Der Leiermann. The piece is elegantly aware of its cultural and social genealogy. But look through the intricate patchwork of quotation and tradition (the doomed Mitko might arrive with scowl and stubble but, as Alex Ross’s program note reminds us, he’s the operatic cousin of Violetta and Manon – “Disease was the only story told about men like me”) and there’s an original voice here too, one that roars with pain and rage.

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.

Listen on Apple Music

Composer: David T Little
Work: What Belongs To You
Performers: Karim Sulayman t, Alarm Will Sound/Alan Pierson
Label: Bright Shiny Things BSTD0240