Christina House/Los Angeles Times
The Beethoven Cello Sonatas
Cellist Antonio Lysy's traversal of the sonatas, joined by Tom Beghin playing historical fortepianos, at the Broad Stage on Sunday promised a fine way to spend the day after Beethoven's 247th birthday…
Lysy is a cellist with lithe tone. He is elegant, not dramatic…
This (Op.69 in A major) is Beethoven's most expansive sonata, and Lysy's grace gave it a special glow.
- Mark Swed, LA Times
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-lysy-beethoven-review-20171219-story.html
The 6 Bach Suites
Antonio Lysy's Carbon Fiber Cello Plumbs Bach's Deepest Heart in Six Cello Suites at The Broad Stage
A nearly full house of culturally-inclined Angelenos, young, old and in between, heard Antonio Lysy play Bach's Six Suites for solo cello entirely by memory Sunday afternoon, at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica. He played a Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello made in Boston in 2014. Throughout the concert, still and sometimes slowly moving images were projected onto the theater's movie screen; these included time-lapse shots of the Northern Lights, red-rock Arizona caves, the interior of a real wooden cello, parched deserts and a virtual tour of the Sistine
Background photo by Daan Oude Elferink
Chapel. The effective impression it gave, of Lysy playing in a variety of alternative, surrealistic/sci-fi settings, subtly contextualized the nexus between Bach's music and his devotion to his faith. Along with that, it liberated each audience member's mind to soar along with the music, each on their own private plane...
It [the 3rd Suite] is a grand, splendid piece but cellists often fail to find the warmth Lysy did...
Normally, it takes a leap of faith, a heightened imagination and almost improbable technical facility – the intoxicating delirium Lysy found in the second Gavotte was unreal – to create the effect...
Lysy played Number Five by tackling the music from the first measure on as if he were hewing it out of stone. Where appropriate, he added the humanity of his carbon fiber cello’s supplicant pleading voice. In Lysy’s hands, the opening movement was as mighty as any prelude and fugue Bach wrote for the organ...
- Laurence Vittes
(full text and a dialogue with Antonio Lysy and Laurence Vittes is available here)
Photo by Jennifer Nguyen - Texas A&M university
Music From Argentina
Argentina's rich musical heritage ignites his passion. Although Argentina was not the land of Antonio Lysy's birth, it well could have been. The vastness of the treeless grasslands of the Pampas that stretch as far as the eye can see is an image burned into his memory from visits he made there as a child with his Argentine-born father, famed violinist Alberto Lysy. So, too, is Argentina's music etched into Lysy's soul, from the rich rhythms of its folk songs to the passionate strains of the Tango, shaped by pre-Hispanic Amerindian traditions and Spanish-based Creole influences. Through his cello, Lysy, a professor in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, shared this lush musical repertoire in a concert he played earlier this year at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica...
One of the songs he performed and recorded,Pampas, recently won a prestigious 2010 Latin Grammy Award for best classical contemporary composition...
- Cynthia Lee, UCLA Today
(full text available here)