Latest news with #ClausGuth
New York Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Audi's Last Act: A Dreamer's Ambition on the Opera Stage
As a small, invited audience trickled into the Grand Théâtre de Provence on Sunday morning, they were greeted with a large portrait of Pierre Audi projected above the stage. It was a solemn photograph, black and white, with Audi staring directly into the camera. But on closer inspection, it was surprisingly casual: His collar was imperfect, as was the lapel of his jacket, and a slight smile hinted at a deeper warmth. The crowd, made up of his friends, colleagues and family, had gathered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France to memorialize Audi, a mighty force in the performing arts, who died in May at 67. As the festival's general director, he had already finished plans for this year's edition, which began last week. But Audi was never really done with a show until opening night. He was known to visit the rehearsals for each Aix production, gently offering what help he could. 'When I think of Pierre,' the opera director Claus Guth said in a speech at the memorial, 'I always have immediately one image of him in front of me: Pierre sitting in the audience like a rock, listening.' Guth paused, then added that 'pierre' is French for 'rock,' and that 'audi' suggests listening. 'He was watching the actors, he was listening, but there was something parallel, as if he would look through what was happening onstage,' he said. 'He would look into the soul of a composer, the soul of the artist performing, of the person inventing. He had deep knowledge and intuition, and could look beyond.' What did Audi see in those moments? Having spent his career as an impresario and director restlessly seeking new ways to present the performing arts, he might have been seeing possibility. He looked at a building in London that had fallen on hard times and pictured the groundbreaking Almeida Theater; he looked at an abandoned, graffiti-covered stadium off a Provençal highway and saw a cavernous new stage for Aix. In his last decade, he programmed the Park Avenue Armory, whose enormous drill hall he filled with the kind of shows found almost nowhere else in New York. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Salome review — trauma and incest in the Met Opera's immense Strauss
The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome was a notorious scandal, shocking audiences with the lurid eroticism of its text and music. More than a century later it retains its capacity to shock, less due to its biblical nature than for its disturbing implications of child abuse and incest. The opera's psychological complexity is an ideal fit for the intellectually probing German director Claus Guth, making a long overdue Met debut. His production originally opened at the Bolshoi in Moscow in 2021 (it was a planned co-production) but the two houses have cut ties since the invasion of Ukraine and the Met has since built its own sets. The production opens with a child Salome dismembering a doll to the sound of a music
