MD Notes: Chess In Concert
(American Version)
Thoughts on the Show
Chess is the most challenging musical I’ve ever music directed. The complexity is almost entirely rhythmic, and some of it feels unnecessary to me. Rhythmic shifting, or shortening a phrase by one beat (like a bar of 3/4 after 3 bars of 4/4), can be a great way to add immediacy and tension into a song, but when it happens constantly, it doesn’t actually do anything. Instead, the sense of constant flux becomes the baseline, and the effect is basically the same as NEVER fluctuating at all, except at a much higher degree of difficulty. A teacher of mine would describe music as “grateful” when it sounded harder to play than it actually was (like a lot of Rachmaninoff, Lizst), but this was the opposite. This is music that, if you play it well, sounds like it is very easy to play when it is not.
My biggest complaint with this show is the fact that many of the songs don’t do much for the story. There are exceptions, of course; “Anthem” and “You And I” and others are soaring and wonderful moments of storytelling.
One of sondheim’s rules is “Let Content Dictate Style",” and most of these songs definitely don’t. They are pop songs because that’s the style the composers prefer, thrown in because they are fun.
And they ARE fun. Hearing the chorus sing the ink off of “Nobody’s Side” and “One Night in Bangkok” is definitely a highlight of this show. And if they don’t move the story anywhere, if the musical material doesn’t flow from the storytelling, we can relax a bit and enjoy ourselves.
This was my first music directing gig for a concert format, and there are things about it that I liked, but overall, I miss the time to develop a relationship with the music - to understand the flow of the entirety that helps inform decisions about the moment-to-moment interpretation.
Instrumentation
The instrumentation I ended up with was:
Violin, Cello, Reed 1/3 (mix and match), Reed 2, Trumpet, Guitar, Bass, Percussion, Key 2/3 hybrid, Key 1 (me).
I generally insist on including strings in pit orchestras, but I think I would not use strings again for this show (assuming I had to similarly reduce the pit). The string music is very sectional, and the style of music actually lends itself to more synth-y strings anyway, alongside the poly synths and pads. Instead of strings, I would fill out the reed section, then add a horn, then another trumpet, then a trombone.
I would not recommend conducting from the piano. I ended up having to constantly evaluate, “Right now, do the singers/audience need the Key 1 book more than the orchestra needs a conductor?” Usually, the answer was that I needed to conduct, which left some holes in the music. A better plan is to give the Key1 book to a player (requires legit chops) and fill in myself from key 2/3 as I was able.
Preparation
The score is riddled with errata, some obvious, some not. Some orchestra books have different measures, missing notes, and so, so many incorrect accidentals. As I didn’t have a full score, a lot of the problems took playing the full orchestration to discover.
There was not a lot of harmonic complexity in this show, so usually, if it sounded wrong, it was.
Rehearsal
Endgame is the hardest song to put together, start to finish, but a song that requires more rehearsal than it may appear is “4 - Argument.” It has some atypical pulse shifts that require extra attention. I ended up adding a high hat on the constant eighth-note pulse, and this helped a lot.
Another gotcha spot is in 2a - Press Conference. This song starts with a rapid shift between 5/8,6/8,7/8 that resolves to a half time rock feel. The first time it shifts to rock is a bar of 2/4, the second time is a bar of 9/8. Neither is hard individually, but the tendency is to expect the second to follow the same pattern (making the word “he’s”) a quarter note.
This show is definitely an exercise in making hard choices in terms of how best to deploy time to the greatest benefit. It is also a great reminder that sometimes one should just relax and enjoy the music.
