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David T. Little travels to Australia for Ghostlight performances
The Australian premiere of David T. Little’s ensemble work Ghostlight sees the composer attending performances in Sydney and Canberra in July. Little’s What Belongs to You has just won the MCANA Best New Opera award.
July brings the first Australian performances of David T. Little’s Ghostlight, performed by Ensemble Offspring at The Neilson ACO On The Pier in Sydney (3 July) and the Street Theatre in Canberra (4 July). The composer is travelling to Australia for these performances, which provide a highlight within the ensemble’s 30th anniversary celebrations, and Little participates in a pre-concert panel discussion before the Sydney concert.
> Visit the Ensemble Offspring website
Composed in 2015, Little’s ritualistic 22-minute Ghostlight is scored for a mixed ensemble of six players, with lighting design an integral part of the conception. At its premiere by Eighth Blackbird, the Chicago Tribune praised Little’s “fertile sonic imagination”, while Musical America described how the work “travels from the quiet of dusk through an often fierce, turbulent night to an introspective dawn”.
Ghostlight charts a spellbinding musical journey – equal parts introspection and turbulent drama. The composer describes how “a ghost light shining in a darkened theater has always struck me as a symbol of both the mysteries of the unknown and the possibility of the sacred. The ghost light itself is of course connected with a sense of the supernatural through the superstitions of the theater.”
“Like many works by the artists to whom each movement is dedicated – Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Anne Waldman and Lou Harrison – Ghostlight is a self-contained journey, first inward, then out. It begins with the calm of a summer dusk, then gradually grows darker, as it travels into murkier and stranger territory – the kind of psychic space where one might begin to hear voices – before emerging again into the sunshine of a new day.”
In May David T. Little visited Montreal where What Belongs to You, his full-evening score for tenor and sinfonietta, won the award for Best New Opera conferred by the Music Critics Association of North America. The awards committee commented that “What Belongs to You is a poetic and sensitive work that conveys the chaos of adult desire and the traumas of gay childhood… the text is often raw and occasionally shocking, yet Little’s score is perhaps his most refined creation to date, blending recollections of Schubert and Britten with more experimental textures. The writing for voice is elegant throughout, the instrumentation intensely atmospheric.”
> Read more about Little’s MCANA award
April brought the re-release of the original cast recording of Dog Days, now available digitally from Bright Shiny Things. Little’s haunting, post-apocalyptic opera, created in 2012 in collaboration with writer Royce Vavrek and Beth Morrison Projects, has been staged widely in the US and has enjoyed three German productions to date in Bielefeld, Schwerin and Braunschweig.
Following its nomination for a 2024 GRAMMY® Award, and recent stagings in Rotterdam, Los Angeles and New York, Little’s Black Lodge travels to Sweden in November, with performances presented by Malmö Opera and Folkoperan in Stockholm. Scored for tenor, rock band, string quartet and backing track, Black Lodge is set in a place between death and rebirth, drawing on the complex mythologies of such artists as William S. Burroughs and David Lynch.
> Visit the Malmö Opera website
> Visit the Folkoperan website
> Further information on Work: Ghostlight
Photo: Daniel Welch