The opera director Pierre Audi has died in Beijing at the age of 67. Audi was principally associated with the Almeida Theatre in London and with Dutch National Opera. He pioneered a collaborative approach between art forms, which saw him work with some of the leading names in the visual arts and architecture. The repertoire of works that he directed was wide, ranging from the Baroque through to Wagner and into the present day, including nearly 40 world premieres.

Audi was born in Beirut in 1957 and moved with his family, first to Paris and then to London. His career as a director began with student productions as an undergraduate at Oxford. In 1979, at the age of 22, he founded the Almeida Theatre in Islington, where, through the 1980s, he directed many productions, taking a particular interest in the work of living composers though the annual Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music and Performance.

In 1988, Audi was headhunted for the role of Artistic Director of Dutch National Opera, a position he held for 30 years. Audi’s own production style came to define the work of the company, large-scale stagings but with abstract scenery and minimal props. The approach proved particularly effective in Wagner, and in 1997 he directed the first staging of The Ring in The Netherlands. Under his stewardship, the company championed the works of many contemporary Dutch composers including Louis Andriessen and Michel van der Aa. Audi was also responsible for commissioning Alfred Schnittke’s opera Life With an Idiot, a major success for the company from its first performance in 1992, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich.

His engagement with the performing arts outside opera led to a parallel appointment as Artistic Director of the Holland Festival 2005-14 and from 2015 at Park Avenue Armory in New York. In 2018, he left Dutch National Opera to take over the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. He also regularly directed operas at other houses, including the premiere of Julian Anderson’s Thebans at English National Opera in 2014, an innovative Parsifal at Bavarian State Opera in 2018, featuring bold set designs by Georg Baselitz and, also in 2018, the premiere of Kurtág’s opera, Endgame, at La Scala.

Many of Audi’s opera productions were released on video and reviewed in Gramophone. David Vickers wrote of an Amsterdam production of Monteverdi (11/05), ‘Audi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse is a masterpiece of controlled timing and patience.’ The following year (10/06), Mike Ashman wrote of Siegfreid, ‘there can surely be few [reservations] about the freshness of Audi's theatrical thinking, and his reinvention of "deconstructionist" effects,’ and later (08/17) described Parsifal (his Amsterdam staging, designed by Anish Kapoor) as ‘… an essential purchase for [Petra] Lang and for Audi’s direction.’