GEORGE CRUMB New World Records 80357 An Idyll for the Misbegotten,

The injection of overtly theatrical elements into the concert world is one of the significant developments of postwar music. No longer can performers be content to sit poker-faced over their scores, playing the notes to the best of their ability and letting the emotional chips fall where they may. Musicians are now called upon to make eye contact (and sometimes more) with the audience, to wear costumes, to speak, to act--all in addition to negotiating the difficult techniques and vivid, unorthodox notation that mark new music. The works of George Crumb (born in Charleston, West Virginia, October 24, 1929) perhaps best exemplify this trend. Other composers may make greater use of "theatrical " movement on stage but none combines such an unfailingly imaginative ear for sonorities with such a highly developed sense of myth and ritual. Not everyone has applauded Crumb's unique compositional ethos. Observing Crumb's directions for the costuming of the performers in Lux Aeterna for soprano and four chamber players--"the performers, masked and wearing robes, sit in lotus position and in near-darkness around a lighted candle; sung phrases of the Requiem text alternate with a refrain for sitar, recorder and tabla"--the British critic Paul Griffiths in his book Modern Music snorts that they suggest "nothing so much as th