The Aix factor
Opera director adds to illustrious career with respected summer music festival
Aix marks the spot where Pierre Audi is planting his next flag in a lifelong crusade for innovation and diversity in the performing arts, passions tracing back to his boyhood in Lebanon.
The celebrated opera director and arts programmer, wrapping up a 30-year tenure at the Dutch National Opera, is taking charge of the month-long Festival d’Aixen-Provence, France — one of Europe’s oldest and most respected summer music festivals.
What’s more, he’s also keeping his job as artistic director of New York’s Park Avenue Armory. And undertaking some high-profile directing assignments, starting with Wagner’s Parsifal to open this year’s Munich Opera Festival in June.
“I know my journey must sound bizarre to people. They think I’m either a lunatic or a charlatan,” Audi said in an interview at his third-floor office in the Armory recently.
“But for me, I don’t regard it as many things. It’s all one stream.”
That “stream” is a dedication to the performing arts, with an emphasis on risk-taking and combining diverse forms and cultural influences to attract new audiences.
He began doing that in 1980 when fresh from Oxford, he founded the Almeida Theatre in London in a decaying Victorianera library and lecture hall. Audi staged festivals of avant-garde plays and music, transforming the space into one of the city’s most respected venues.
The idea of working in an unconventional space came naturally to Audi because growing up in Lebanon, where he lived until his family moved to Paris and then London, “there was no theatre, no place to do anything.
“So I saw a lot of things in Roman ruins, open-air antiquities,” he said.
“They framed the performance, they were the decor. So for me that is sufficient. If you have a slice of history the audience can dream in that framework.”
That’s one reason he took the job at the Armory, where the 55,000-square-foot drill hall can be reconfigured to fit just about any presentation.
The Parsifal production, starring Jonas Kaufmann and Nina Stemme, will be in a more conventional venue at the National Theater, home of the Bavarian State Opera.
Audi will also direct an opera by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag based on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame for Milan’s La Scala in November.
And he’ll return to his old company in Amsterdam for a production in June 2019 of parts of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-opera cycle Licht.
Audi has no plans to direct operas at Aix, but will be “commissioning a lot of new works, fostering new talent and transmitting a love of the arts to a new generation.”
One project especially dear to his heart is the festival’s Mediterranean Youth Orchestra, which brings together promising musicians from countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, including his native Lebanon.
“We can’t just sit back and continue to make Western opera as if the rest of the society hasn’t moved,” he said.
“A lot of these countries need to express sometimes very painful messages. Music and poetry can be a powerful vehicle.”