His first love was the piano. The violin came next. Then choral music with the Coastal Sound Music Academy.
In middle and secondary school, Port Coquitlam’s Chris Lysack fell for musical theatre. At Centennial, he studied under the two greatest drama and musical teachers in the school district: Dave Secunda and James Bryson.
Broadway would be his goal, he thought.
But back in 1996, the year he graduated from the Coquitlam high school, there weren’t many post-secondary institutions offering musical theatre programs.
So he returned to his first love.
As a freshman on scholarship at the University of Indiana, Lysack knew he wasn’t going to make a career as a concert pianist.
Still, music was his passion and he obtained his doctorate in piano performance as well as a PhD in French literature.
However, by then, opera had become a major focus in his life.
During his literature studies, he had worked on a dissertation on the genre, of which he admitted he was not a fan.
“I was taken by the athleticism of the singers,” he remembered. “It was the sounds that they could make with their bodies…. I had spent my whole life playing piano and was well-adapted to the notion of making music and having technical virtuosity but this was a vocal instrument that was fascinating to me and raw.”
By the time he was 27, Lysack was singing opera seriously. He appeared in the university production of Susannah by Carlisle Floyd and, in the spring of 2008, he clinched his first major role as a tenor in The Tales of Hoffmann, also at the University of Indiana.
Lysack moved to New York City to study opera at the Manhattan School of Music and, for the past six years, he has been based in Germany.
He has performed with a few European companies such as Staatsoper Hamburg, Landestheater Salzburg Theater fur Niedersachsen, Stadttheater Bern.
However, Theater Aachen has been his home for the past four years.
This fall, he portrayed Cavaradossi in its Tosca production as well as the title role in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes for Theater Bremen. Next year, he’s also the star in Theater Aachen’s Tannhauser and Hans in Die verkaufte Braut.
This year also saw Lysack return to his beloved instrument: the piano. He made his German chamber music debut in the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg (he has piano recordings on the Capstone and Centaur labels).
But despite his extensive training and critical acclaim in the U.S. and Europe, Canada is never far from his mind.
In 2014, he won a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to study the Czech language to prepare for a role. “Strangely, being in the Czech Republic was almost a homecoming,” he said during a telephone from Germany last month, adding, “I’m very grateful for [the grant]. It was an honour.”
His parents have travelled to Europe to see him on stage at least twice in six or seven operas. During the summers, Lysack comes home to PoCo to visit them and his sister and her family.
Performing on home soil is on his bucket list. “I would love to sing in Canada but I haven’t yet,” he said. “The last time I performed in Canada was as a pianist in 2003 or ‘04 but never as an opera singer.
“I hope it happens soon.”
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