Franco-Lebanese director Pierre Audi, director of the Aix-en-Provence Lyric Art Festival, died at the age of 67, we learned, on Saturday May 3, from the institution and the Ministry of Culture.
“It is with immense sadness that the team of the Aix-en-Provence festival has just learned the brutal death of Pierre Audi, which occurred in the night of[u] Friday 2 [au] Saturday May 3 in Beijing. The world of artistic creation loses an immense artist and director of institution ”announced the festival team in a press release. “Pierre Audi had [consacr]his life in artistic creation » And “Has deeply renewed the language of the opera”writes, meanwhile, the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, on X.
In 2019, this native of Beirut had taken the general management of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, one of the biggest international events in lyric art, and had been renewed at the end of 2021 for a mandate that ran until 2027. In the early 1980s, this great follower of the opera outside the walls was known by melting the Almeida theater in a disused building in London artistic innovation.
An exceptional artistic journey
“When I thought the Almeida Theater, opened in 1980, it was in reaction against a certain type of English theater”he explained in 2022 in an interview published on the Aix Festival website. He then became artistic director of the National Opera of Amsterdam, where he created most of his staging, working with visual artists like Georg Baselitz or Anish Kapoor. He will remain in this position almost thirty years.
In 2015, he headed for New York by becoming artistic director of Park Avenue Armory, a multidisciplinary place of nearly 5,000 square meters which welcomed facilities, such as that of Christian Boltanski in 2010, and monumental staging of Ivo Van Hove or Ariane Mnouchkine. “It would have been impossible to show them in a conventional room”he explained in 2022.
He himself had staged the creation of Arab apocalypse, by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, at the Aix festival in 2021, and had to go up Tosca from Puccini to the Paris Opera at the end of the year.
“He believed deeply in the future of lyric art (and musical theater), art more than any other capacity, according to him, to overcome all crises”add the organizers of the Aix festival.