The Chess Chronicles, Part 11: Anatoly & Molokov/Where I Want To Be

After doing so many customizations, it's kind of nice to have a song with very few changes in it.  The introduction to the Russian team is played pretty much like the book, although there are a few little cuts and vamps to make it work for the Lyceum.

When performing these older songs, I prefer to go back to the original source to determine how the songs should sound.  In this case, it means abandoning the original introduction  I cut m.1-5 and 8, and replaced the little counter melody line in m.6-7.  It looks like this:

And we vamp on this until the voice comes in at m.9.  Since the melody line is similar to the vamp "hook", it fits just fine.  

I cut m.35-41, and did m.42-43 twice.  For our timing, this worked perfectly.

It's clear that this music was written by someone who has classical theory training, as the enharmonics were respected:

The melody line goes from Bb to A# as the chords go from Em-5 to F#/E.  They are the same pitch, but they are different notes.

For "Where I Want To Be", I only needed to add a vamp to m.11, and ritard as we exited the vamp.  The rest of the song was performed as is, with some minor tempo changes at the ends of each of the verses.

I ended up using a straight piano sound for this song, rather than a "honky tonk" or "thin piano" patch as in the original recording.  Our Anatoly was a solid opera singer, and going with a conventional sound complimented his voice.

This is one of my favorite songs in the show, and I was glad that we didn't need to do too much with it.  It also demonstrates that we didn't make change "for the sake of change"; we had good reasons to do all the customizations that we did.