Alumni Profile – Kevin Burdette
On the evening of March 23, 2012, my wife and I were in the audience at the George Mason University Center for the Arts in Fairfax, VA, to see the Virginia Opera production of The Mikado with College Scholars alumnus Kevin Burdette playing KoKo, the comic lead. As the review in the Washington Post said,
(It) was a rollicking funny, energetic and cheerful production. Much of the credit goes to bass Kevin Burdette . . . Burdette has a wonderfully resonant voice and splendid diction, but in this role his vocal talents were eclipsed by his acrobatic clowning and miming skills. He groveled, quivered and danced his way through the ever-more convoluted plot with exquisite abandon, bringing the whole cast along with him.
As a College Scholar, Kevin Burdette developed a program in Music and History with an emphasis on opera, culminating with a senior thesis entitled “Drawing Circles around Society: Societally Marginalized Groups and their Treatment within Opera.” He was accepted by both Columbia University Law School and The Juilliard School; Columbia was willing to defer his enrollment, so he went to Juilliard first, for its two-year masters program, ultimately splitting his two years up with a year as a young artist with the Opéra National de Paris. After a handful of years as a full-time opera singer, and after six years of deferral, he attended Columbia Law School, where he was a Kent Scholar and where his College Scholars thesis provided the seed for his major writing assignment, an article entitled “Intertext and Stereotypes in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: An Examination of the Dialogue over Law and Societal Change in Richard Wagner’s Music-Drama”. After earning his J.D., he passed the New York bar exam and began work at a Debevoise & Plimpton, a New York City-based law firm, all the while trying to juggle law practice with opera. Finally, after practicing for a few years, he resigned from his law firm to pursue singing full time, with great success. He has worked as a soloist with the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, Teatro Colón, Opéra de Montréal, New York City Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, and the Spoleto Festival USA, as well as with many regional opera companies and orchestras including Opéra de Québec, Chicago Opera Theater, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Virginia Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, Wolf Trap Opera Company, Toledo Opera, Knoxville Opera, Opera Grand Rapids, Lyric Opera of San Antonio, Nashville Symphony, Utah Symphony Orchestra, and Virginia Symphony Orchestra.
In 2011, Kevin married Natalia Lizette Cortez who is associate general counsel at Teach For America in New York. Kevin’s father, Dr. Edwin G. Burdette, is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Tennessee.
More information about Kevin Burdette can be found on his website http://www.kevinburdette.com. You can find his upcoming engagements on the website. If you have an opportunity to hear him sing, by all means take it.