Frédéric Tardy initially had oboe instruction with Alain Blanc-Brude, and then studied, from the age of sixteen, under Jean-Christophe Gayot and Guy Laroche at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Lyon. After graduating with honors in 1990, he began his professional career as principal oboe of the Orchestre National du Capitole in Toulouse (under Michel Plasson), moving in 1993 to the same position in Lyon’s Orchestre de l’Opéra National, where he has played without interruption to the present day in the same position under chief conductors Kent Nagano, Iván Fischer, and Kazushi Ono. Frédéric Tardy has regularly been invited to perform as a guest with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester Munich (Zubin Metha), the WDR Symphonieorchester in Cologne (Semyon Bychkov), the Orchestra della Fondazione Arturo Toscanini in Parma (Lorin Maazel), and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in Paris (Myung-Whun Chung). Since 1998 he has been assistant professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, and has given summer courses at the festivals in Les Arcs and St-Geniez d’Olt.