Bright Shiny Things Releases What Belongs to You by David T Little, Starring Grammy®-Winners Karim Sulayman and Alarm Will Sound, Led by Alan Pierson

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 26, 2026 CONTACT: Paula Mlyn | A440 Arts paula@a440arts.com | (212) 924-3829

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES WHAT BELONGS TO YOU 
DAVID T. LITTLE’S OPERA BASED ON THE NOVEL BY GARTH GREENWELL, 
STARRING GRAMMY®-WINNERS KARIM SULAYMAN 
AND ALARM WILL SOUND LED BY ALAN PIERSON

NEW YORK, NY–On June 26, 2026, Bright Shiny Things releases the world premiere recording of What Belongs to You [BSTC-0240], GRAMMY® nominee David T. Little’s opera for tenor and chamber orchestra about a doomed love affair between an American English teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria — haunted by memories of his violently homophobic father — and a sex worker named Mitko. Based on the award-winning novel by Garth Greenwell, the libretto was adapted by Little himself. Winner of the 2025 MCANA Award for Best New Opera, the work was written for and features GRAMMY®-winning tenor Karim Sulayman and GRAMMY®-winning new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson. Sulayman and Pierson were also classmates of Greenwell’s, and the ensemble celebrates its 25th anniversary with What Belongs to You as one of the pillars of this landmark season. The recording follows the opera’s 2024 world premiere production at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Virginia, directed by Mark Morris and performed by the same artists. The opera will receive its New York premiere in spring 2027 at NYU Skirball, featuring Sulayman, Pierson, and Alarm Will Sound.
 
What Belongs to You is available for pre-order here.

In Alex Ross’s liner notes to What Belongs to You, he makes the point that Garth Greenwell’s prose is already musical. Not only was he trained as a singer growing up in Kentucky, and later at Interlochen and Eastman, but his first experiences with opera were milestones for his artistic development. The novelist explains: “My entire aesthetic compass comes from that day when I was fourteen years old and saw the Kentucky Opera production of Turn of the Screw.” His writing itself, as Ross puts it, “rolls off the page with surging rhythm and burgeoning resonance.” That kind of writing often resists musical settings, but some composers have made it their specialty, most notably Benjamin Britten, whose Turn of the Screw – based on Henry James – so inspired Greenwell. David T. Little made his own libretto from Greenwell’s novel with a comparable reverence for the text, as Ross says “telescoping Greenwell’s prose while preserving its inner music.” Little’s score even alludes to Britten’s opera Death in Venice, for the psychological value of the reference and perhaps in a nod to Britten’s mastery of text setting.
 
Little alludes to other music as well, providing a level of commentary but also suggesting a partial pedigree for his score. The opening scene when the American first encounters Mitko takes place in a subterranean bathroom, and the tenor’s opening line quotes Monteverdi’s Orfeo, echoing the descent into the underworld and foreshadowing the story’s tragic outcome. Other musical allusions include John Dowland’s “Flow, My Tears” – appropriate for a year marking the 400th anniversary of the composer’s death – and Schubert’s Winterreise. The final song of that cycle, “Der Leiermann,” with its image of a despised and forgotten organ-grinder playing mechanically in the snow for nobody, is the musical allusion that ends Little’s opera.

Little’s dramatic palette amounts to much more than the single voice of the narrator. The music, for one thing, provides its own commentary, like a second narrator. The brief verbal departures from the narrator’s voice are also taken by Alarm Will Sound when they embody first Mitko and then the hateful voice of the American’s father, singing in shape-note style, “strong, bright, intensely focused, and almost harsh.” Finally, since the narrator himself is also a protagonist, his level of emotional involvement in the story has its own dramatic arc. Ross explains:
 
“At first, everything we hear and imagine is filtered through the American’s welter of preoccupations—his desires, his fears, his hang-ups, his risk-taking, his cawing crowd of memories. In the final scene, he has stepped back, beholding Mitko’s fully operatic tragedy with an artist’s wide-open, if tear-stricken, eyes.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

A natural musical storyteller with “a knack for overturning musical conventions” (The New York Times), two-time GRAMMY® Award-nominee David T. Little is a composer and producer known for stage, concert, and screen works permeated with eclectic influences and the power of the unexpected. His broad catalog probes the deep corners of human psychology, unafraid to invoke the mythical, bewitching, disturbing, surreal, or comedic in order to explore the human condition. His award-winning, internationally performed operas include Dog Days, JFK, and Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera, (libretti by Royce Vavrek), Black Lodge (libretto by Anne Waldman), as well as Soldier Songs, Sin-Eater, and What Belongs to You, all to his own libretti. Little has been commissioned by the world’s most prestigious institutions and performers, including projects for Alarm Will Sound, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, New World Symphony, London Sinfonietta, The Crossing, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Kennedy Center, and Beth Morrison Projects. His music has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Venice Biennale, Holland Festival, Malmö Opera, Folkoperan (Stockholm), LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Opéra de Montréal, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the LA Philharmonic. Heard on such labels as New Amsterdam Records, Pentatone, Sono Luminus, Bright Shiny Things, and Cantaloupe Music, he is currently developing a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, as well as several other new stage, film, and concert projects. He is the chair of the music composition department at the Mannes School of Music and is published by Boosey & Hawkes.

Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, praised for his “lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma” (BBC Music Magazine). He earns widespread acclaim for his innovative programming and recording projects while performing on the world’s stages in opera, orchestral concerts, recital and chamber music. Recent engagements have included Carnegie Hall, Royal Opera House, Spoleto Festival USA, Opera Philadelphia, Wigmore Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Aldeburgh Festival, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Stockholm’s Drottningholms Slottsteater, Houston Grand Opera, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Chicago, New World, National and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, and the Ravinia and Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festivals. In 2025 he debuted as Pelléas in a new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at Longborough Festival Opera to massive critical acclaim and in 2026 he reprises his celebrated portrayal of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in Houston and debuts at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. He also returns to Carnegie Hall and Wigmore Hall. Mr. Sulayman won the 2019 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for his debut solo disc, Songs of Orpheus (Avie Records). His second album, Where Only Stars Can Hear Us (Avie Records) with fortepianist Yi-heng Yang, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart and was included in The New York Times’s Best Classical Music of 2020. His third solo album, Broken Branches (Pentatone), with guitarist Sean Shibe, debuted at #1 on the UK Classical Chart and was nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. It was named one of the Best Classical Albums of 2023 by The New York Times and one of the Best Recordings of the 21st Century by BBC Radio. Karim was nominated for the 2026 GRAMMY® for Best Opera Recording for Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration (Bright Shiny Things).

A GRAMMY®-winning, 22-member band committed to innovative performances and recordings of today’s music, Alarm Will Sound – celebrating the 25th anniversary of its founding this season – has established a reputation for performing demanding music with energetic virtuosity. With classical skill and unlimited curiosity, Alarm Will Sound takes on music from a wide variety of styles. “Stylistically omnivorous and physically versatile” (The Log Journal), their repertoire comes from around the world, and ranges from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced. Since its inception, Alarm Will Sound has been associated with composers at the forefront of contemporary music. The group itself includes many composer-performers, which allows for an unusual degree of insight into the creation and performance of new work. Alarm Will Sound is the resident ensemble at the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Held each July at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the festival features eight world premieres by early-career composers. In 2013-14, Alarm Will Sound served as artists-in-residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alarm Will Sound may be heard on twenty recordings, including Lift, their most recent release, and Land of Winter, featuring music of Donnacha Dennehy, and the premiere recording of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. Acoustica, their genre-bending, critically acclaimed album, features live-performance arrangements of music by electronica guru Aphex Twin.
 
GRAMMY®-winning conductor Alan Pierson has been praised by The New York Times as “a dynamic conductor and musical visionary” and by The New Yorker as “a sensational force” with “powerful ideas about how to renovate the concert experience.” He is Artistic Director and conductor of Alarm Will Sound and Co-Director of the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble. Pierson is passionate about realizing the dreams of living composers, and treasures close relationships with David T. Little, Steve Reich, Missy Mazzoli, David Lang, Donnacha Dennehy, Cassandra Miller, Tyshawn Sorey, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Michael Gordon, Jlin, Ted Hearne, George Lewis, and many others. Committed to interdisciplinary collaboration, he regularly works with a diverse array of artists including multi-hyphenate artist Taylor Mac, choreographer John Heginbotham, and producer Eartheater. ??Pierson creates signature theatrical performances that engross audiences in deep and affecting experiences of contemporary music. In fall 2026, he leads his most ambitious project yet: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians: Staged Variations at the Park Avenue Armory. Pierson works widely in opera, premiering major works like David T. Little’s Dog Days, and leading productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Nationaltheater Mannheim, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Beth Morrison Projects, L.A. Opera, Fort Worth Opera, EMPAC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pierson served as Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 2007 to 2015 and as Principal Conductor of Dublin-based Crash Ensemble from 2006 to 2021. A sought-after guest conductor, Pierson has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the London Sinfonietta. He has released more than 30 albums and 8 opera recordings and holds degrees from MIT and the Eastman School of Music.

For more information, please contact: Paula Mlyn, paula@a440arts.com

Photo Credits: Production photo: ©Jay Mather
David T. Little: ©Daniel Welch
Karim Sulayman: ©Erin Baiano
Alan Pierson/Alarm Will Sound: ©Jay Mather