Take it as a high compliment to the harrowing, riveting Soldier Songs that I was grateful it lasted only one hour. My nerves couldn’t have handled more.

The title of composer and librettist David T. Little’s opus suggests a song cycle, and if heard in a concert context, that might be how the work comes across. Formally, it might also be a cantata. But in this brilliantly realized streaming production from Opera Philadelphia, Soldier Songs is unquestionably an opera—though one that features a sole singer-actor, the extraordinary Johnathan McCullough—with the scale, grandeur and theatricality the medium can deliver…

Click here to read the full review on Parterre Box.