Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67-OxBig News Network

He was educated at the University of Oxford, where he directed a production of Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” in 1977. A few years before, Mr. Audi had led a group that purchased an early-19th-century building in the Islington neighborhood of London that, over its varied history, had housed a display of Egyptian mummies and served as a music hall, a Salvation Army facility and a factory that made carnival novelties.

By the time Mr. Audi discovered it, it had fallen into disrepair. But he saw its potential as a performance venue, and he led a fund-raising effort to renovate it and reopen it as a theater with a few hundred seats. (He would later link his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.)

Through the 1980s, the Almeida developed a hip reputation, with homegrown and touring productions that offered early boosts to the careers of now-prominent artists like Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Phelim McDermott, Deborah Warner and Simon McBurney. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music became renowned as a presenter of new and commissioned operas.

During his tenure at the Dutch National Opera, beginning in 1988, the house also became a hotbed of commissions and progressive stagings, including collaborations with visual artists like Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz. There, Mr. Audi directed the Netherlands’ first full production of the “Ring” and a cycle of Monteverdi’s operas.

“The thing about Pierre was, it wasn’t going to be traditional, old-fashioned opera,” said the opera administrator Matthew Epstein, who advised Mr. Audi during that early period. “It was the expanding of the repertoire both backward — toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for — and forward, toward so much contemporary opera.”

Mr. Audi is survived by his wife, the artist Marieke Peeters; his children, Alexander and Sophia; his brother, Paul Audi; and his sister, Sherine Audi.