Charting His Own Course

Pierre Audi is no traditionalist, but his artistic motto could well be: “Something old, something new.” The 39-year-old director first made his mark in London’s avant-garde theater and music scene. More recently, however, he has garnered acclaim for staging some of the oldest operas on the books.

His eclectic tastes have, in fact, been key to his success as artistic director of the Netherlands Opera since 1988. In addition to producing the classics, Audi has commissioned new works and brought an array of iconoclastic artists to work on both familiar and all-but-unknown operas.

His appointment was unexpected given his limited background in the field. Yet his lack of experience in the often-regimented world of grand opera--along with his experimentalist temperament--turned out to be an asset. Los Angeles Opera General Director Peter Hemmings says that despite initial surprise at the appointment, Audi’s eclectic approach to repertory has allowed him to develop a large and faithful audience. “The Dutch are more interested in experimental things,” Hemmings says.

Audi says his strategy has been to challenge the received wisdom.

“Opera is really a very free form, but it’s been hijacked by tradition and convention and packaged into this kind of iconographic art form which is a vehicle for stars and so on,” Audi says. “I decided to approach it from an open way, to question why I love opera and what makes opera vital to a young audience today.”

Audi makes his L.A. Opera debut with his Netherlands Opera staging of Claudio Monteverdi’s “The Return of Ulysses (Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria),” opening Tuesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Unlike grand opera, with its emphasis on spectacle and orchestration, Baroque opera is more of a chamber form, focusing on the singers. “The Return of Ulysses,” first performed in Venice in 1640, is Monteverdi’s last opera and one of only four of the prolific composer’s works in the form that have not been lost.

Yet old as the Baroque opera may be, it has more in common with late-20th century scores than might be readily apparent. Like a

new work, for instance, it will be unknown to most audience members.

“People have difficulty sometimes in accepting new works, because they are unfamiliar and foreign or because they’re making sounds that don’t belong to our sense of what melody is,” Audi says during a rehearsal break interview in the L.A. Opera offices. “But I think equally bizarre is a return back to what Monteverdi did. Of course, he does take you through the words in a recognizable melodic way. But the form of the event is very fresh to an opera audience.

“For me, Monteverdi’s form is the most radical. I was interested in going to the heart of why it’s radical. For me, after ‘Ulysses,’ opera starts to go wrong. It became a much heavier form, with a large orchestra and the conductor dominating.”

Audi, who was born in Beirut and reared there and in Paris, read history at Oxford University in England from 1975 to 1978. After completing his studies, he decided to pursue his longtime interest in performance and music.

He launched his career by founding the Almeida Theatre in London in 1979. A center for musical and theatrical innovation with a decidedly internationalist bent, the Almeida quickly gained a reputation among the European avant-garde community. The theater’s contemporary music festival, in particular, became a gathering spot for artists from around the world.

Nearly a decade after starting the theater, however, Audi was ready for a bigger challenge. Still, when he took the helm of the Amsterdam-based Netherlands Opera in the 1988-89 season, it was, he recalls, “a big shock.”

Right away, he had to start planning the first season he was responsible for, in 1990-91, and that’s how he came upon Monteverdi.

“I found it on the shelf when I arrived there,” Audi says in his dulcet Oxford English. “It was a score that was being considered by my predecessor, but the project had been abandoned.”

“Ulysses” tells the story of the wandering Greek hero’s return home to his wife, Penelope, who has been waiting 20 years for him, and of how he displaces her suitors to regain his mate and throne.

Although Audi found the piece compelling, he had some reservations about the project: “The auditorium in the Netherlands is very difficult. Coming from a small, experimental 300-seat theater, I was very daunted by the idea of making a production for such a big house,” he says, comparing the Almeida to the opera’s 1,500-seat theater.

It was a departure for Audi in other ways as well.

“It was my first production of an opera by a dead composer,” he says. “Until then, I’d done mostly modern pieces. I was mainly interested in 20th century theater and opera.”

Fortunately, the Netherlands’ then-new Muziektheater was a flexible space, and that convinced Audi to attempt the piece.

“You could take some of the seats out and the sight lines were worked out so that you perform in a very intimate manner inside the auditorium,” he says.

If there is such a thing as the usual way to stage Monteverdi--and the composer is not often performed--it is clearly different from Audi’s way. Reconfiguring the house, in particular, allowed Audi to create the close proximity he believed was essential to the work.

“To do Monteverdi’s music, you have to accept that the contact between the singers and the audience has to be very intimate,” he says. “Since Monteverdi was rediscovered early in the century, they tried to make the music fit into the [grand] operatic tradition--with a conductor, with orchestration under all the music. The original was not like that. It’s not grand opera, it’s music theater.”

Audi’s version downsizes the orchestra to a period ensemble. As the director explains: “What we are doing is very close to what it was like originally, an event without a conductor, with a very small orchestra, in which the voice and the singer’s personality are the prime movers of the whole thing.”

Still, Audi has made Monteverdi “new” in some ways. Musicologist Glen Wilson’s edit of the score deletes many of the original’s allegorical scenes involving gods and goddesses. The only allegorical interlude that remains is the prologue, and Minerva--who triggers the events leading to the reunion--is the only goddess.

“Glen Wilson’s version takes away all the unnecessary scenes,” Audi says. “It’s a longer opera, an hour more than what we will see here. But a lot of these scenes are mythic and very heavy.”

The goal was to create a work that would be more accessible to modern sensibilities.

“We kept the story very clean, fast-moving and simple; each part is an hour,” Audi says. “In this production, and a lot of productions that I do, the singers are very naked. There is nothing else around them. The focus is on them.”

This essentialist approach allows Audi to get at the work’s mythical element minus the cumbersome trappings of the original.

“The nature of the staging and elements of scenery are trying to create a world of myth--but one that the imagination of the audience can reinvent in a way,” he says, referring to set designer Michael Simon’s iconographic use of such items as a copper column, a giant boulder and a rectangular sandbox. “We are perhaps onstage, perhaps in a room, perhaps in nature.”

The streamlined production also points toward what Audi considers the opera’s climactic moment: “The most extraordinary coup de thea^tre in the piece is in the end, when Ulysses comes back, and you have this love duet--which is also a very sour duet, because after 20 years, people don’t just fall into each other’s arms. The music by Monteverdi is so human and tells in a very subtle way what can’t happen between these two people anymore.”

Audi’s “The Return of Ulysses,” sung in Italian with English supertitles, premiered at the Netherlands Opera in 1990 and was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1993. At BAM, it was hailed by Paul Griffiths in the New Yorker as “by far the most wholly fine, the most candid and expressive piece of operatic staging seen in the city during the entire season.”

L.A. Opera’s Hemmings was equally enthusiastic: “It made the piece very real to a modern audience. The scenery is bare, the movement is meticulously directed, and the story is by no means an uncommon story today. It’s quite unlike anything we’ve ever done before.”

The L.A. staging will be the production’s first outing with a new cast, led by baritone Thomas Allen as Ulysses and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade as Penelope. The local period ensemble Musica Angelica--which performs on a platform at audience level, above the area where the orchestra pit would normally be--will provide the accompaniment.

Once again, Audi has been forced to worry about staging Monteverdi in a large house (the Chandler Pavilion has more than twice the seating capacity of the Netherlands’ Muziektheater).

“It’s not easy,” he says of the necessary restaging. “But we are [bringing the playing area] into the auditorium and trying to make the scenery come into the auditorium and to re-create a little bit of the atmosphere we had in Amsterdam, in order to destroy the relationship between the orchestra pit and the stage.

“That, I think, is important to this production,” Audi reiterates. “It’s not a spectacle to see at a distance. You have to be in the middle of it.”

After his success with “The Return of Ulysses,” Audi went on to stage the three other surviving Monteverdi operas in the Netherlands in 1991, ’93 and ’95.

“I’ve done all four now, and it’s been a great event in Amsterdam and also the other places we’ve taken them,” he says. “People have been very open to it.”

At home in Amsterdam, Audi benefits not only from a state-subsidized venue but also from a receptive audience.

“We have a very open young public in Amsterdam,” he says. “If I had to submit to the pressures of traditional opera--inviting famous names and so on--I don’t think I would have done what I’ve done.”

In addition to the Monteverdi and several works by Arnold Schoenberg, Audi has staged such familiar works as “La Boheme” and “The Magic Flute.” He has commissioned new works and has invited such innovative artists as Peter Stein and Peter Sellars to direct with his company. The Netherlands Opera, for instance, premiered Sellars’ production of “Pelleas et Melisande,” which was seen here as part of L.A. Opera’s 1994-95 season.

Yet Audi, who will mount the Netherlands’ first staging of Wagner’s complete “Ring” cycle beginning in the 1997-98 season, is concerned about the state of opera directing today.

“The problem is that in the last 10 or 15 years, the opera intelligentsia, the critics, have expected the director to come into a production as a second author,” he says.

“I enjoy seeing X’s vision of ‘Turandot’ or whatever. It can open your eyes to new meaning and make a link between that work and today. But sometimes, through excess or the necessity to feel that providing your concept as a director is more important than the work, it goes badly wrong. There I think it brings opera backwards.”

His goal is to bring the form forward instead. And that, he says, is accomplished--as with “Ulysses”--by a commitment to innovation with an openness to ideas from the past.

“If you look at every era of opera, every phase has been a continuous rethinking of the form,” Audi says. “That’s true now more than ever, because the form is completely destroyed and composers are no longer interested in narrative. They’re interested in deconstructing the form--perhaps too much.

“Perhaps there’ll be a return to narrative in the next century,” he continues. “Who knows? But at the moment the form is very open.”

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* “The Return of Ulysses,” L.A. Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesday, Thursday and May 13, 16 and 18, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, 1 p.m. $23-$130. (213) 365-3500.