Pierre Audi is definitely the right hire

IN 1988, the Netherlands Opera appointed as its new head a 30-year-old Lebanese-born theater director with no background or experience in traditional opera. His passions were avant-garde music, theater and visual art. The opera world was aghast. One prominent New York opera administrator I spoke with at the time said that Pierre Audi would be lucky to last three years and that the Netherlands Opera would be lucky to survive him. Not that anyone outside Holland was likely to notice or care, so provincial was the company.

Last month, while sitting in Audi's sleek office in the Muziektheater, Amsterdam's modern opera house, and waiting for him to arrive, I looked around for evidence that he had been running the company for 20 years and had made it one of the most exciting and imaginative in the world. There wasn't much. Audi has minimalist tastes. His glass desk was not cluttered; the walls were free of art or photographs. Cardboard moving boxes on the floor gave the impression of a guy always prepared to make a quick getaway. Clearly, Audi could have been packed and out of there in an hour.

But he would have had to pack another office as well. Audi is also artistic director of the Holland Festival, a major international showcase for music, dance, theater and visual art that runs annually through most of June. In that instance, he turned around a foundering festival in a mere four years and, like the opera company, it too is now among the (if not the) liveliest and most adventurous of its kind.

What's more, Audi has a third career as an opera, theater and film director, and that's flourishing as well. Los Angeles Opera's brilliant productions of Monteverdi's "The Return of Ulysses to His Fatherland" and "The Coronation of Poppea" were his. In Austria, the Salzburg Festival will once more this summer mount his gorgeous and goofy "Magic Flute." The Metropolitan Opera has hired him for a new production of Verdi's early opera "Attila" in 2010, which Riccardo Muti will conduct and the Swiss architecture stars Herzog & de Meuron will design. Every few months, another striking Audi production, either one he's directed or one he's commissioned at the Netherlands Opera, comes out on DVD. In August, Opus Arte will release John Adams' "Doctor Atomic," which Peter Sellars directed in Amsterdam last year.