David T. Little Wins 2025 MCANA Award for What Belongs to You
What Belongs to You is the winner of Music Critics Association of North America's 2025 Award for Best New Opera, given annually to a new work in recognition of both musical and theatrical excellence.
The Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) has named What Belongs to You by composer-librettist David T. Little the winner of its 2025 Award for Best New Opera. Based on Garth Greenwell's acclaimed 2016 novel, the opera is praised as "an unflinchingly honest work" exploring the trauma of gay childhood and the complexities of adult desire.
The work premiered on September 26, 2024, at the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond. Directed by Mark Morris and conducted by Alan Pierson, the production featured tenor Karim Sulayman with Alarm Will Sound. The opera's musical language blends refined lyricism with experimental textures and references to Britten, Dowland, Monteverdi, Valentini, Schubert, and Grisey.
The MCANA Awards Committee, comprising leading critics from outlets including The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and Opera, commended the opera for its poetic intensity, elegant vocal writing, and emotionally resonant finale. In a statement, the committee noted:
"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. The final scene, in which the narrator describes meeting a mortally ill Mitko for the last time, packs classic operatic force, with a shivering quotation from Schubert's 'Der Leiermann' to close."
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 in the United States and Europe are to be announced. A recording is being planned for release on Cantaloupe Music.
Now in its eighth year, the MCANA Award for Best New Opera honors excellence in both composition and libretto for operas premiered in North America. Past winners include works by Missy Mazzoli, Ellen Reid, Jeanine Tesori, and Rene Orth.
The award was presented to the composer during MCANA's annual meeting in Montreal on May 30, 2025.