Born in Beirut, Lebanese director Pierre Audi studied at Oxford University and founded, in 1979, in London, the Almeida Theatre and its contemporary music festival, which he directed for a decade. The Amsterdam Opera House, which he directed from 1988 to 2018, was named Opera House of the Year in 2016 during his tenure, and then lent its stage to many of his productions. There, he presented a Monteverdi cycle, the first in-house production of Wagner’s Ring, as well as numerous works by Landi, Rameau, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Verdi, Puccini, Schoenberg, and Messiaen.
Photo credit: Joel Saget
From 2004 to 2014, he was Artistic Director of the Holland Festival, before being appointed Artistic Director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2015, and General Director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2018. He has also been a guest at the Salzburg Festival, Opéra national de Paris, La Monnaie in Brussels, English National Opera, Munich Opera and Los Angeles Opera, among others. In 2016, he directed William Tell at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and two years later, he made his debut at La Scala in Milan with the premiere of György Kurtág’s Fin de partie. In the course of his career, he has collaborated with artists such as Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Herzog & de Meuron, Jannis Kounellis, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Jonathan Meese, and built up a vast creative repertoire of some forty works. Most recently, he has presented the world stage premieres of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gurrelieder and Aus Licht at the Amsterdam Opera, St John Passion in Brussels, new productions of Tristan und Isolde at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, in Rome and Amsterdam, and Parsifal in Munich. He has received many distinctions, including the Leslie Boosey Award, the Drottningholm Gold Medal, and the Gold Medal of Honor for Arts and Sciences of the House of Orange-Nassau. In 2000, he was made a Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion, and in 2006, a Knight of the French Legion of Honor. In 2009, he was the first recipient of the Johannes Vermeer Prize, a new Dutch state award for a prominent artist.
