Latest news with #PierreAudi
Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Pierre Audi obituary: influential opera director
Pierre Audi, an ebullient and bull-necked Beirut-born Oxford graduate, spent a year in the 1970s hunting for a London venue to use as a theatre. Eschewing 'abandoned cinemas which looked like mosques, derelict town halls which resembled La Scala and an agricultural hall like the Vatican', he finally stumbled across a decaying former warehouse in north London. Built by public appeal, the Islington Literary and Scientific Institution originally opened in 1837. Later it was a music hall, staged cock fights and wrestling matches, served as a Salvation Army citadel and became a showroom for Beck's British Carnival Novelties run by Malcolm Heaysman, a transvestite murdered by a stepson who had stumbled across his secret life. Harry Secombe, Ned Sherrin, Robert Stigwood and Steven Berkoff had
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pierre Audi obituary
Based successively in London, the Netherlands and France, Pierre Audi, who has died suddenly aged 67, was over a period of 45 years the indefatigable procreator of a sizeable body of innovative work, largely centred around the operatic stage. As founder of the Almeida theatre in Islington, London, artistic director of the Dutch National Opera (formerly Netherlands Opera) and latterly of the Aix-en-Provence festival, he relished the charting of unknown territory, passionately believing that art forms, not least that of opera, need to be constantly renovated and challenged. Having acquired the derelict 19th-century building – formally owned by the Salvation Army, and later a toy factory – in Almeida Street, off Upper Street, Audi spearheaded a public campaign to reopen it as a theatre, running it as both a producing company and a receiving house from its opening in 1980 until Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent took over as artistic directors in 1990. Under Audi's stewardship it rapidly established itself as a hotbed of avant-garde activity. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music and Performance, held at the theatre and at other local venues, offered the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, Michael Finnissy, Lukas Foss and other modernists, performed by artists including Astor Piazzolla, Yvar Mikhashoff and the London Sinfonietta. Spoken theatre, often of a physical nature, was provided by touring companies such as Complicité and Cheek by Jowl, while Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord company (an inspiration for Audi's project) appeared in 1982. The international dimension was crucial for Audi. Several new operas were commissioned and/or performed there, among them John Casken's Golem, directed by Audi and premiered in 1989, and the festival successfully demonstrated that there was a market for contemporary music and theatre. Audi was barely 30 when he was headhunted by Netherlands Opera in 1988. He had never set foot in the Netherlands and had never directed opera on a large stage. Facing down objections from members of the Dutch cultural establishment, the Netherlands Opera board placed their faith in his reputation for artistic originality and a cosmopolitan perspective, together with the ability to realise such a programme on a relatively modest budget. There he continued to espouse contemporary music, commissioning Alfred Schnittke's Life With an Idiot (1992) and works from Dutch composers such as Louis Andriessen, Michel van der Aa, Guus Janssen and others. The overall programme, however, was broad and eclectic, from Gluck, Mozart and Wagner (he staged the first production of the Ring in the Netherlands) to Schoenberg and Messiaen. Some of the world's leading directors, including Harry Kupfer, Peter Sellars, Peter Stein and Stefan Herheim, were lured to Amsterdam by Audi. In September 2018 he took over the direction of the Aix-en-Provence festival, continuing to foster the principle of a 'dialogue between the arts', combining music, the visual arts and video, with musical theatre and non-theatrical events all part of the mix. Despite the ravages of Covid in 2020, the festival managed to mount the premiere of Kaija Saariaho's opera Innocence, about the psychological aftermath of a school shooting, the following year. Roland Wood (Oedipus) and Susan Bickley (Jocasta) in Thebans, 2014, by Julian Anderson and Frank McGuinness at the London Coliseum. The English National Opera production was directed by Pierre Audi. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Other significant stagings followed, including, in 2023, George Benjamin's Picture a Day Like This (a co-production with Covent Garden and other houses), Philip Venables/Ted Huffman's The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (a co-production with the Manchester international festival and others) and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera directed by Thomas Ostermeier in collaboration with the Comédie-Française. Pledging to extend the reach of the festival geographically, Audi enabled the director Romeo Castellucci to stage Mahler's Resurrection Symphony as an 'exhumation of a mass grave' in the newly reopened Stadium de Vitrolles – a graffiti-daubed, black concrete box on the outskirts of Marseilles. He also initiated a June festival with free entry, as 'a gift to the city', featuring an open-air concert attracting 5,000 people on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix. Born in Beirut to a Lebanese banker, Raymond Audi, and Andrée Michel Fattal, he went to school in Paris after his family moved to France and then took a degree in Oriental studies at Exeter College, Oxford; he was still only 22 when he founded the Almeida theatre. Losing no time in establishing his credentials as an imaginative, risk-taking impresario, he seized the opportunity to gravitate further towards his first love, opera, in Amsterdam. At Netherlands Opera he enjoyed a fruitful power-sharing arrangement with the administrative director, Truze Lodder, who established a tough financial discipline for the company. Despite its gleaming new home in the Muziektheater, the company was, when Audi took over, labouring under a huge deficit and a crisis of credibility, being described as a 'shambles' by critics. Over the course of his remarkably long career with the company (he remained there for 30 years), Audi, along with Lodder, raised its status to an exemplary level, his defiantly progressive tendencies and hunger for innovation earning him respect and support from the public. There too he was able to develop his own career as an opera director, both in Amsterdam and worldwide. His visual aesthetic tended towards the spare and the abstract. In his Ring with the designer George Tsypin (1999), traditional props were frequently abandoned, replaced by symbolic elements, such as chains dangling from the ceiling in the first scene of Das Rheingold, foreshadowing the slavery that capitalistic acquisition brings in its wake. The already broad stage of the Musiektheater was extended, sweeping round to encircle the orchestra, which became part of the set, reaching right down into the audience space. Some seats were closely adjacent to the action; other audience members sat in 'adventure seats', suspended on gantries high above the stage, the aim being to draw in spectators, in the manner of Greek drama. The incipient brutalism of his austere style reached its nadir in the provocative, grotesquely sexualised Flower Maidens' costumes in the 2018 Munich Parsifal, designed by Georg Baselitz. But Audi was also capable of spectacular effects, as in his production of Monteverdi's Orfeo (1997), with the waters of the Styx bursting into flames as Orfeo crosses it: a stunning evocation of Pluto's infernal kingdom. Concurrently with the post at Netherlands Opera, Audi held the artistic directorship of the Holland festival (2004–14), where works in multiple genres were presented in conjunction with such artists as William Kentridge, Tacita Dean and Ryoji Ikeda, and by directors including Sam Mendes and Ivo Van Hove. In 2014 he directed the world premiere of Julian Anderson's Thebans (with a libretto by Frank McGuinness) at English National Opera. He also founded the interdisciplinary Opera Forward festival in 2015, in the same year taking over the artistic direction of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where he commissioned work across various art forms. He is survived by his wife, Marieke Peters, and his children, Alexander and Sophia, his brother, Paul, and sister, Sherine. Pierre Audi, impresario and opera director, born 9 November 1957; died 3 May 2025
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67
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.'
