Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67

New York Times

03-05-2025

Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario whose transformation of a derelict London lecture hall into the cutting-edge Almeida Theater was the opening act in a long career as one of the world's most eminent performing arts leaders, died on Friday night in Beijing. He was 67.
His death, while he was in China for meetings related to future productions, was announced on social media by Rachida Dati, the minister of culture in France, where Mr. Audi had been the director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2018.
Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, which opened in 1980 and swiftly became a center of experimental theater and music. He spent 30 years as the leader of the Dutch National Opera, and for part of that time was also in charge of the Holland Festival. For the past decade, he had been the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
All along, he continued working as a director at theaters around the world. Last year, when the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels cut ties with Romeo Castellucci halfway through his new production of Wagner's four-opera 'Ring,' the company turned to Mr. Audi as one of the few artists with the knowledge, experience and cool head to take over such an epic undertaking at short notice.
'He profoundly renewed the language of opera,' Ms. Dati wrote in her announcement, 'through his rigor, his freedom and his singular vision.'
Pierre Raymond Audi was born on Nov. 9, 1957, in Beirut, Lebanon, to Andrée (Fattal) Audi and Raymond Audi. His father worked for the family bank, which was founded in the mid-19th century. Mr. Audi was raised in Paris and in Beirut, where he started a cinema club at school and invited directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jacques Tati to speak.
In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, he spoke about the formative influence of Middle Eastern storytelling traditions on his work. 'Coming from the place I come from, a story is the start of everything,' he said. 'Through 20th-century music, I discovered the chaos, which is the other side. I think my life is about working a path through those contradictions.'
He was educated at the University of Oxford, where he directed a production of Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens' in 1977. A few years before, Mr. Audi had led a group that purchased an early-19th-century building in the Islington neighborhood of London that, over its varied history, had housed a display of Egyptian mummies and served as a music hall, a Salvation Army facility and a factory that made carnival novelties.
By the time Mr. Audi discovered it, it had fallen into disrepair. But he saw its potential as a performance venue, and he led a fund-raising effort to renovate it and reopen it as a theater with a few hundred seats. (He would later link his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.)
Through the 1980s, the Almeida developed a hip reputation, with homegrown and touring productions that offered early boosts to the careers of now-prominent artists like Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Phelim McDermott, Deborah Warner and Simon McBurney. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music became renowned as a presenter of new and commissioned operas.
During his tenure at the Dutch National Opera, beginning in 1988, the house also became a hotbed of commissions and progressive stagings, including collaborations with visual artists like Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz. There, Mr. Audi directed the Netherlands' first full production of the 'Ring' and a cycle of Monteverdi's operas.
'The thing about Pierre was, it wasn't going to be traditional, old-fashioned opera,' said the opera administrator Matthew Epstein, who advised Mr. Audi during that early period. 'It was the expanding of the repertoire both backward — toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for — and forward, toward so much contemporary opera.'
Mr. Audi is survived by his wife, the artist Marieke Peeters; his children, Alexander and Sophia; his brother, Paul Audi; and his sister, Sherine Audi.
In Aix-en-Provence, Mr. Audi was able to present just one season before the pandemic hit. In 2020, when the festival's performances were canceled, he managed to hold rehearsals for 'Innocence,' a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021.
His true gift was as a presenter, guiding works to the stage like 'Innocence,' widely acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century. Mr. Audi's own stagings tended to look timeless and stylized. They could feel a tad bland, but they also had an appealing modesty, showcasing the music and performers while his own work receded into the background. When he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2010, with Verdi's 'Attila,' a collaboration with the fashion designer Miuccia Prada and the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times that the production was 'not entirely successful, and sometimes weird' but was 'intriguing and full of resonant imagery.'
Mr. Audi had a flair for the kind of event-driven presenting that reigns at festivals like Aix and raw spaces like the Armory, where he hosted longtime collaborators like William Kentridge and Peter Sellars; wrapped seating around the New York Philharmonic for a performance of Saariaho pieces; and brought spectacles like Claus Guth's 2023 staging of Schubert songs, which filled the Drill Hall with field-hospital beds.
In 2019 in Amsterdam, he put on a three-day bonanza of chunks from Karlheinz Stockhausen's 29-hour, seven-opera cycle, 'Licht,' including Stockhausen's most notorious invention: a string quartet playing in helicopters. Last year, he brought to the Armory a smaller (and helicopter-free) selection, a surprisingly elegant, restrained show of lighting effects and immersive sound.
In 2022, a half-century after he stumbled on the building that became the Almeida, Mr. Audi opened another new-old venue, for the Aix Festival: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive, graffiti-strewn black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a Provençal hilltop for more than two decades.
'I saw the height of it,' he said, 'and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.'
Mr. Audi took a risk, planning the first production in the stadium without knowing whether its renovation would be ready in time, and without conducting an acoustic test in the space. But 'Resurrection,' Mr. Castellucci's staging of Mahler's Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave, was both sober and thrilling, the kind of music theater you couldn't find anywhere else.
Mr. Audi didn't rest on his laurels after that. As always, he tried something different. In 2023, he presented a trio of films accompanying Stravinsky's epochal early ballets, played live with orchestra.
'The important thing,' he said soon after 'Resurrection' opened, 'is not to imitate what we did this year.'