Folk, jazz, etc: A kelpie's gift takes children on new musical adventures

Published on Thursday 5 June 2008 20:54

SHE MAY be known as a cutting-edge clarsach player with eclectic interests, but these days harpist Savourna Stevenson is channelling her creative energies into orchestral composition. The spectacular results will be performed by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera (OSO) in East Lothian on Monday, to launch the CD of her "musical adventure" for children, Misterstourworm and the Kelpie's Gift. Meanwhile, another narrated orchestral work is already in the can.

Stevenson's long-standing ambition to compose a large orchestral work for children, based on Scottish folklore, was fulfilled in 2001 by a Creative Scotland Award, which enabled her to work on the project with the writer Stuart Paterson, with whom she has been collaborating in theatre since the 1980s. Misterstourworm, she reckons, may be the first new work combing narrative and orchestral music since Prokofiev's much-performed Peter and the Wolf.

On Monday afternoon, under the baton of Christopher Bell, it will be reprised before an invited audience, largely of schoolchildren, in the immense converted grain store at Skateraw, near Dunbar. There, as on the CD, the tale of a young hero vanquishing a sea monster will be narrated by the Glasgow actor Billy Boyd – no stranger to epic yarns, given his Lord of the Rings movie credentials.

The CD also features a non-narrated suite of the music, as well as three orchestral settings of songs by Les Barker, commissioned from Stevenson by the National Youth Choir of Scotland. "Having it recorded was the most awesome experience of my life," she says, revealing that Misterstourworm went down so well at its premieres that Children's Classic Concerts commissioned another piece from her. The result, also recorded with the OSO and likely to be released later this year, is Hansel and Gretel, this time narrated by Blythe Duff of Taggartfame.

Much has happened since Stevenson won a Creative Scotland award in 2001. For a start, the harpist, who has two older children, now 19 and 13, found she was pregnant – the CD is consequently dedicated to young Brendan, now six.

"The Creative Scotland criterion is that it should lead to other things, and it's been a happy story for me," she says. "I fell completely in love with Misterstourworm, then I was commissioned to write the three songs for NYCOS and decided to orchestrate them."

Previously, Stevenson's "classical" compositions had not extended beyond a delicate quintet for harp and strings from her Touch Me Like the Sun album – which gained exposure in unexpected quarters, finding its way into episodes of Sex and the City. Composition, however, is in her genes: her father is composer Ronald Stevenson, whose recent 80th birthday was celebrated by concerts, including one in London at which she played her harp quintet with the Martinu Quartet.

Amassing the resources of a full-blown orchestra is something rather different, she says, and she has been studying long-distance with Ian Macpherson, a tutor at the Royal Academy of Music. "I hope you can hear some of my love of Ravel in there," she says of the vivid orchestral tones of Misterstourworm, also citing Katachurian as a favourite composer. "I'm not trying to part of the clever 'squeaky garden gate' brigade. I don't really want to write music that's difficult to listen to."

Narrative with orchestration she calls a neglected area of repertoire: "I hope people won't feel I'm talking down to children, but that I'm giving them very serious work. I will write some serious music for grown-ups, but they'd better not expect it to be too serious."

&#149 Misterstourworm and the Kelpie's Gift is on Circular Records