Fred Burdey is a disco ball of many facets. A passionate pianist, he one day fell for the voice, so hard that he spent several years earning his living as a classical tenor, after a master’s degree in Amsterdam. He is also a painter (he had a taste of art school) and a portraitist, while being… a bioinformatician. Doesn’t he hold a master’s in biology? Swinging since childhood between art and science, he has never wanted to choose.
Today he is getting back to basics: a voice, a piano to accompany himself, or a guitar, more at home on stage and easy to take anywhere. Italian songs sung the operetta way, a touch of jazz, and now and then a song of his own. What he is after is simplicity, and the freedom that classical music so often denies its performers.
The Schubertian tenor, performer of Poulenc and Fauré and a great lover of Rossini and Verdi, hasn’t forgotten the teenager who adored Gainsbourg and the Pet Shop Boys. This shy man loves the stage. This nostalgic soul has the heart of the crooners of yesteryear and dares to yodel. In his fifties, he fully embraces a “silver daddy” persona and shoots his own music videos, from Granada facing the Sierra Nevada to Gainsbourg’s street in Paris. He lives with his partner and knows how to have fun. “Yes,” he says, “my life is a perpetual oscillation — and it’s going to carry on.”