Never to Forget, London Symphony Chorus, review: a beautiful, simple memorial to NHS workers
On the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service, the London Symphony Chorus’s ‘Never to Forget’ was released on its YouTube channel. This tribute to the NHS workers who have lost their lives as a result of the pandemic is that rare thing – a successful musical memorial. This is now a difficult genre, because we no longer have an accepted language for acts of collective remembrance. The old forms that once worked so perfectly—the solemn processional or funeral march – now seem stiff and dated.
Howard Goodall, the composer the LCO chose to write its memorial was a natural choice, not just because he’s its patron. Since he first shot to fame in the Eighties as the composer of witty signature tunes for TV series such as Blackadder, Goodall has become known as a composer of choral music, often with a spiritual message as in his enormously popular Eternal Light: A Requiem.
His gift for music of remembrance is beautifully demonstrated in this new piece, which was composed for 100 singers of the Chorus, plus a few instrumentalists from the London Symphony Orchestra. Each player and singer was videoed at home, and the results knitted together into a remarkably polished eight-and-a-half minute film.
When Goodall set to work the number of NHS victims stood at 122 (though now it stands at more than 200), and to make sure we remembered every one he had the brilliant idea of using all the names as the text of his piece. We simply hear those names, gently chanted without comment, mostly by a solo voice. The singer’s face appears on the screen just long enough to sing the name before giving way to another, as if for a moment singer and individual victim are in communion.
The piece’s expressive effect owes much to its delicately coloured instrumental accompaniment, which launches the music before any voices are heard. Meditative harmonies on a chamber organ bring a specifically Christian sense of ritual solemnity but the handbells, harp and piano soften that feeling, and the plaintive sound of the dilruba ( a bowed Indian stringed instrument) adds a flavour of something far beyond these shores. This is as it should be, because when the singers start to appear on the video chanting the names, it’s evident the people named hail from every corner of the globe.
The piece seems at first to unfold in a circular manner, the same harmonies and mournful chanting phrases returning again and again. But sometimes a name will stand out as if a spotlight has fallen randomly on a single face, and Goodall shrewdly counteracts the impression of gentle stasis with more forceful episodes.
Here the voices come together, the video image fills with singing heads, and the harmonies develop heft and direction before subsiding once more to meditative gentleness. At the end the music fades to a simple major chord. It sets the seal on a memorial of radiant, dignified pathos, which is moving in its utter simplicity.
Hear Howard Goodall’s Never to Forget at the London Symphony Chorus’s YouTube channel
