Echoes of Mahler as Blake enters the Land of Counterpane

with an Edinburgh school's recent choice of composer to orchestrate A

Child's Garden of Verses.

To celebrate its tercenenary , the Mary Erskine School has

commissioned Howard Blake, of The Snowman fame, to compose The Land of

Counterpane for choir and orchestra -- culmination of a gala concert

scheduled for March 25 in the Usher Hall.

Blake, whose prolific output totals 475 works, recognises in Stevenson

the same sense of wonder as in The Snowman: ''The Verses do capture a

child's vision. I decided to set them simply, as they are, and get the

orchestra to do the rest.''

Ironically, Howard Blake's TV work for Channel 4 (The Snowman and

Grandpa) are all most people know about him. The composer takes a

philosophical view: ''A violin concerto takes longer to get accepted

into the repertoire . TV is ephemeral. I just write whatever comes up;

one reaches different types of public.''

It would be wrong to assume, however, because 57-year-old Blake is by

and large a ''serious'' composer, that his liaison with Channel 4 was in

some way out of character. On the contrary: he is in love with film,

always has been. After graduating from the Royal Academy Blake took

two-and-a-half years out of music altogether and worked for the National

Film Theatre as a projectionist. Work as a session pianist for EMI and

Decca led to writing music for films, and he notched up such successes

as The Avengers, The Duellists (special jury award at Cannes), and A

Month in the Country (British Film Institute award for musical

excellence).

Patches of intense commercial activity have been interspersed with

periods of reflection and religious comtemplation; during one, he

stopped taking commissions, retired to the countryside, and produced a

number of devotional works such as his Festival Mass and Songs of the

Nativity.

It is this versatility which has enabled Blake to join the ranks of an

elite few capable of earning a good living from composition. Curiously,

although he is no stranger to writing for young people, the Mary Erskine

commission is the first from a school. He needed some persuasion -- for

one thing, he worried that A Child's Garden of Verses was too twee for a

modern audience. But the school's principal pointed out, tongue in

cheek, that such considerations hadn't bothered Mahler. And, in fact,

what Blake has produced is a Mahler-esque song cycle for full orchestra

and chorus incorporating a prologue and epilogue spoken over the music.

The latter is to be read by actor David Rintoul.

Mary Erskine's head of music, Helen Mitchell, describes Blake's

orchestration as ''superb, very atmospheric, and beautiful to play.''

The performers, who include 300 singers aged between 10 and 17 (the

Junior School is involved in the choir, just as boys from the twinned

Stewart's/Melville College swell the orchestra), are reportedly loving

it.

News of Howard Blake's orchestration has already reached the ears of

several companies eager to translate the poems into film. Meantime, it's

more than fitting that what Stevenson called his ''ragged regiment'' of

verses has been transformed into song. ''They seem to me,'' wrote the

poet prophetically, ''to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds

in my ears freshly.''