[2] Sumeida's Song received concert performances at Carnegie Hall and the New York Society for Ethical Culture before its first staging.
[5] Reviewing the first staged performance for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described Sumeida's Song as "an intensely dramatic 60-minute four-character opera with a searing score that deftly draws from Arabic and Western contemporary musical sources.".
[1] He went on to note that "Mr. Fairouz’s multilayered music catches the complexities and crosscurrents of this family and the grim realities of their lives" and described Fairouz as having "hints of various Western contemporary idioms in his musical language: American neo-Romanticism; stretches of near-atonality that evoke Berg; astringent washes of sounds that seem inspired by Ligeti, who was one of Mr. Fairouz’s teachers.
"[1] On disc, Sumeida's Song was noted by WQXR-FM as "a lushly scored chamber opera, (completed when Fairouz) was only 22.
Its concerns with peace and communal healing place it in the humane tradition of such works as Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlos.