PERFORMING ARTS : Wolfgang Amadeus, Meet ‘Mr. Ed.’

If British conductor-composer Donald Fraser ruffled some critics’ feathers with his work on Delos International’s 1995 release “Heigh-Ho! Mozart,” his new project is guaranteed to raise hackles.

In “Heigh-Ho! Mozart,” a huge, crossover hit for Delos, and its successful sequel, “Bibbidi-Bobbidi Bach,” Fraser arranged Disney songs in the style of great composers. The concept was the brainchild of Delos product manager Al Lutz, and the aim was to spark children’s interest in classical music.

Now, the composer and Delos are reaching out to “anybody, everybody,” Fraser said, with another Lutz concept, “Mozart TV,” a just-released, seriocomic homage to classical composers and . . . TV show music. Even the witty TV Guide-style packaging targets a crossover audience.

Imagine a Mozartian concerto made up of “The Brady Bunch,” “MASH” and “Hill Street Blues” themes. Or an Alan Hovhaness approach to “The X-Files,” a classical Spanish guitar rendering of “A horse is a horse, of course, of course . . . ,” or “Jeopardy!’s” “Think Music” on harpsichord, Handel-style.

Delos’ tongue-in-cheek promotional approach to the album’s title is that if the prolific and financially strapped Mozart had had the opportunity, he would have embraced TV as a creative and monetary gold mine. And if purists object, Fraser thinks maybe they should lighten up.

“I get a little tired of pompous [expletive] who don’t have a sense of humor,” the composer said, during a lull in production at Delos’ Hollywood offices. Comfortably burly and balding, with an intense gaze and an unruly mustache, Fraser, 50, was referring to pans among the accolades for his work for young people.

A review of “Heigh-Ho! Mozart” in the New York Times credited Fraser’s arrangements as “sometimes imaginative,” but added, “indeed, it is astonishing to find so much time and energy (let alone talent) spent on a weird trick of stylistic mimicry.”

Fraser thinks such criticism misses the mark.

“It’s not to say people shouldn’t dislike it,” he said, with an accent, and perhaps a pugnaciousness, rooted in his cockney origins.

“But of the negative [reviews] I have read, if I were having a conversation with those critics, I would simply point them in directions that I feel they hadn’t thought about.”

He is referring in part to Dohnanyi’s “Variations on a Nursery Theme” in the style of different composers, works by Mozart, Beethoven and “in some ways Schnittke and others who wrote in certain styles to express contemporary thoughts in music. And I’m quite sure there’s a lot of good stuff in Haydn poking fun at other people.”

As for the appropriateness of “Mozart TV,” which both pokes fun and pays tribute, “obviously, this is a generation of TV lovers,” Fraser said, “so you’d like to expand that interest to other areas . . . why not classical music?”

It’s for “anybody who grew up with these shows,” said Grant Gershon, assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gershon conducts and is pianist on the release, which features Scott Tennant, of the L.A. Guitar Quartet, and an entity put together for the recording called the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra (mostly core members of the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra).

“In addition,” Gershon said, “I think people who have a background in classical music will be able to enjoy the multiple layers of [Fraser’s] creativity. He’s got a terrific ear for style, but still reserves a creative side for his own personality. He really balances those two aspects.”

Guitar virtuoso Tennant solos on “Taxi,” Villa-Lobos-style, and on the “Mr. Ed” theme that comically sneaks into a Joaquin Rodrigo-based concerto.

“As an artist,” Tennant said, “I was amazed that it works so well. As a guitar player, I just had fun.”

Tennant shrugs at what critics might say. “I’ve done some very serious things in my career, playing Bach or even Manuel de Falla on the guitar, and purists won’t touch it because it’s not what it was originally intended to be. You’ll always get a reaction from somebody no matter what you do.”

Fraser wanted to convey “a feel” for the composers’ styles, not re-create them. He also had to find the right composer for a particular show. A minimalistic “X-Files” was a natural. The show conveys “the sense of something new, that there’s something out there,” he said. “I think a lot of minimalists have that [feeling].”

On the other hand, trading “I Love Lucy’s” jazzy feel for a Baroque trumpet, a la English composer Henry Purcell, happened after “I tried a hundred ways to make something work, and then suddenly, it just struck me.”

Fraser grew up with music in his working-class London home. His mother played the piano and family songfests, often enlivened by a dock-working grandfather in his cups, were common. Inexpensive concerts were regular outings and Fraser, who was concocting his own tunes at the age of 3, began studying music seriously when he was 8.

Entering the Royal College of Music at 17, Fraser took all of its top competition prizes in his second year there; at 19, he was composing for British film and television. From 1974 to 1980, he served as resident composer for the Old Vic Theatre Company. He has conducted notable orchestras in concerts and recordings, and his classical works have been performed by such luminaries as Placido Domingo, Yehudi Menuhin and Jessye Norman.

Currently, Fraser and his wife, author-playwright Jane McCulloch, divide their time between England, L.A. and Chicago, where Fraser is resident conductor for the Illinois Chamber Symphony.

If the work Fraser has done “persuades a dozen people to admire classical music, great, marvelous,” he said. “But let’s hope they find a bit of humor and a sense of love [in the work], as well as a feeling for all these composers.

“It’s not to change the world,” Fraser noted. “It’s just to say that there are all these lovely people around and you may want to go on and listen to more.”