6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Tuesday18 February 2020

ARTS

Elizabeth

Llewellyn

and David

Junghoon

Kim in

‘Luisa

Miller’

Tristram Kenton

Richard Fairman

In the 50 years since it moved to this

theatre, English National Opera has

rarely ventured into the high-blood-

pressure arena of early Verdi operas.

Macbeth,ErnaniandI due Foscari part,a

they have been cautiously avoided, so

the company’s firstLuisa Miller s ani

eventtobewelcomed.

It arrives, for better or worse, like the

theatrical equivalent of a punch in the

face. The singing has a passion and high

drama that are rare at ENO, while the

production is one of those combative

“look-at-me”exercisesthatisdifficultto

ignore,howeverhardonetries.

Luisa Miller s an adaptation fromi

Schiller. At its centre is one of those

father-daughter relationships that so

touched the composer, who had lost his

own two daughters, and the result at its

best is as heart-rending asRigolettoor

Iltrovatore.

As always in early Verdi, everybody

gets a lot to sing. The lovely Elizabeth

Llewellyncomes into her own in the

pathos of Luisa’s final scenes, where she

is matched with an impassioned and

ringingRodolfoinDavidJunghoonKim.

He really sings his heart out and stakes

hisclaimasaVerditenor.Ideally,Luisa’s

father, Miller, calls for a voice with more

paternal warmth than Olafur Sigurdar-

son’sfiercebaritone,buthehaspowerto

spare. Down in the bass department,

there is more sturdy singing in the evil

duo of James Creswell’s Count Walter

and Soloman Howard, who makes a big

impact as Wurm. Even Federica’s small

role comes across vividly thanks to

mezzoChristineRice.

They all get decent support from con-

ductor Alexander Joel, who does not

overplay the melodrama. The clashes of

personalities, painted in primary col-

ours by Verdi, are also realised boldly in

BarboraHorakova’sproduction.

Unfortunately, another show entirely

seems to be going on at the rear, where

a bevy of clowns and a dance group

are camping it up as if they have sud-

denly found themselves in a circus

tent with a jolly big orchestra. At least

ENO’s audience can look upon this

rare outing ofLuisa Miller s a doublea

win. They get some exciting singing

in the knowledge that they will almost

certainly never have to sit through the

productionagain.

ToMarch6,eno.org

A theatrical punch in the face

O P E R A

Luisa Miller

Coliseum, London

aaaee

Clockwise, from above left: Henry

Moore, ‘Reclining Figure: Bone’

(1975); Bill Brandt, ‘East Sussex’

(1964); Henry Moore, ‘Two Piece

Reclining Figure No.4’ (1961); Bill

Brandt, ‘Nude, East Sussex Coast’

(1960) —Henry Moore Foundation; Bill Brandt Archive

wine merchant’s cellar, where, in 1940,

Brandt discovered a group of Orthodox

Jewsporingovertheirreligioustexts.

This is where the differences between

the two artists’ work are at their most

marked. Brandt’s photographs give us

anintimatesenseofstealingpastpeople

abandoned in sleep. One man has his

arms thrown back behind his head,

cushioning it against the tunnel wall;

next to him a woman, perhaps his wife,

has a hand to her face, while her sleep-

ing child lies at right angles to her, one

chubby leg resting on her stomach.

These are real people. We can see up

their nostrils and into their open, possi-

blysnoring,mouths.

Moore’sShelter Drawings, by contrast,

seem to belong to a mythical under-

world. However often they’re seen, they

stillarouseacombinationofincredulity,

sadness and awe. These rows of face-

less, bundled figures ummon imagess

of the dead: preserved in ash in

Pompeii,crowdedinRomancatacombs,

piled into mass graves, or, for today’s

viewers, stacked up outside Nazi

concentrationcamps.

It is notable that Moore didn’t sketch

from life in the Underground, feeling it

was an intrusion; he committed the

scenes to memory and made notes for

hisdrawingsonthewayhome.

The aim of the two curators, Martina

Droth and Paul Messier, is to “erase the

hierarchy” between the two artists and

their respective mediums. It also

demonstrates how often their work

converged and intersected (Brandt died

in 1983 at 79; Moore in 1986 at 88).

Moore used the camera to study

the small objects he collected — bone

fragments, pebbles, flints — from every

angle oassesstheirpotentialforupscal-t

ing to larger three-dimensional works.

Their parallel is in Brandt’s photo-

graphs, including a series of rare colour

transparencies, of small rocks and peb-

bles he found on the coast of East Sus-

sex. Photographed at ground level, they

becomemonumentalsculptures—rem-

iniscent of Moore’s, or Barbara Hep-

worth’s, whose works Brandt photo-

graphedin1956inmuchthesameway.

Within the Hepworth’s elegant, spa-

cious galleries, the curators have done a

terrific job of pacing and displaying a

varietyofworks.Aswellasprints,draw-

ings and some large Moore sculptures,

theseincludemagazinespreads,contact

sheets, books, collages, small sculptural

maquettesand oundobjects.f

Both artists played with scale. Both

revisited their early works to create new

ones. Moore’s wartime pen-and-wash

drawings,forexample“Standing,Seated

and Reclining Figures Against a Back-

ground of Bombed Buildings” (1940),

wereclearly instrumental in the devel-

opmentofhispostwarpublicsculptures,

particularlyhisfamilygroups.

After the war, both artists escaped

I

t seems an obvious idea, coupling

Bill Brandt and Henry Moore — two

contemporaneous British mid-

century artists whose subject mat-

ter was often similar, even if their

treatment was very different.Yet the

new exhibition at the Hepworth in

Wakefield turns out to be the first time

the pair have been shown together —

unless you count the occasion in 1942

when Moore’s drawings and Brandt’s

photographs of Londoners sheltering

during the Blitz were printed side by

sideinthemonthlymagazineLilliput.

Theshowbeginsduringthewaryears,

when Brandt and Moore were both

working in London. Brandt was taking

photographsformagazinessuchasLilli-

put, Weekly Illustrated and Picture

Post, while Moore, whose street in

Hampstead had been bombed and who

had moved with his wife to Hertford-

shire, travelled back to the city to make

sketches ofruined buildings,bombing

andpeopleshelteringunderground.

It opens with Brandt’s now-famous

photographs of London under the

blackout,withtheHousesofParliament

lit by moonlight. Searchlight beams cut

throughtheskies(hispicturesaredelib-

erately printed as dark as possible) and

the Moon highlights the ruined facades

of buildings. Brandt’s pictures are

alwaysaestheticallypoised,withasense

of emptiness and mystery that reflects

his admiration for the French photogra-

phers Brassaï and Atget, whose work he

had first seen in Paris, where he was

brieflyapprenticedtoManRay.

Moore’s treatment of the same sub-

jects is very different. “Eighteen Ideas

for War Drawings” (1940) is a wonder-

ful series of small sketches laid out

across the paper like a storyboard or a

contact sheet. Each tiny scene is worked

up in a mix of pencil, wax crayon, col-

oured crayon, watercolour, wash, pen

and ink; each with its title scribbled in

pencil above: “devastated houses”, “gun

shells bursting like stars”, “burning

cows”,and,asifapreludetowhatwillbe

an underlying theme of the show, “night

War and peace, darkness and light

into the landscape. In 1945 Brandt

bought an old camera with a wide-angle

lens and began what would become a

study of the female nude that lasted for

more than a decade. Developed to pho-

tograph police crime scenes, the camera

gave his domestic nudes — dispropor-

tionately large naked women trapped

inside empty rooms — a surreal,

disturbingquality.

During the 1950s, he took his models

to the beaches of East Sussex and Nor-

mandy, where, shooting from a low

angle, cropping sections of their bodies

andmanipulatingtheprintsinthedark-

room, he produced what are probably

his most famous pictures: huge female

figures, bleached out and cropped until

they are barely recognisable as human.

However admired and saleable these

works became, it’s hard to look at them

now without an uncomfortable sense

of women being subjugated by the

photographer’sgaze.

Brandt reworked his negatives

throughout his life and his prints are

notoriously variable. He deepened the

blacks and bleached out the whites of

these close-up, truncated nudes,

touched them up with pencil and ink

andblewthemoutofscale.

Several iterations of them line the

walls of the final room in the show, as do

both artists’ depictions of Stonehenge.

Moore drew the monument close up,

and his 1973 lithographs emphasise the

muscularity of his drawing. Brandt

framed the stones similarly, but also

from a distance, with cows and cloudy

skiesorsilhouettedagainstsnow.

For a generation celebrating nation-

hood and rediscovering the natural

landscape after the war, the Neolithic

circle was a potent symbol. One of the

snowpicturesgavePicturePostitscover

for a special crisis issue in1947: “Where

StandsBritain?”

The human body was never far from

either artist’s work. In Moore’s case, it

emerged from the grain of a piece of

elm, as n the large reclining figure thati

is the gleaming centrepiece of the last

room. In Brandt’s case,it emerges as a

looming, sexually suggestive form. By

the end of this exhibition, both artists

seem to have been aiming for the same

semi-abstractgoal.

ToMay31,hepworth.org.uk

An illuminating show at the

Hepworth Wakefield puts the

works of sculptor Henry

Moore and photographer Bill

Brandt together in a gallery

for the first time. By Liz Jobey

and day — contrast”. This is an exhibi-

tionaboutdarknessandlight.

In 1941, Moore and Brandt were com-

missioned by the Ministry of Informa-

tion to make works that showed Lon-

doners sheltering in the Tube tunnels or

otherundergroundplacessuchasChrist

Church, Spitalfields or the East End

Left: Bill Brandt, ‘Liverpool Street Extension’ (1940). Right: Henry Moore,

study for ‘Tube Shelter Perspective: The Liverpool Street Extension’ (1940-41)

Moore didn’t sketch

from life in the

Underground, feeling

it was an intrusion

FEBRUARY 18 2020 Section:Features Time: 2/202017/ - 18:06 User:david.cheal Page Name:ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition:EUR, 6, 1