Cuba's Havana Lyceum Orchestra has evolved from purely amateur roots into a professional ensemble, appearing in Europe and the U.S. The group has recorded for the Sony Classical and Alpha labels.

The beginnings of the Havana Lyceum Orchestra date to 2007, when a statue of Mozart was unveiled in Havana. A group of students from the Instituo Superior de Artes and the Escuelas Nacionales de Arts performed at the unveiling, conducted by Pepe Méndez (José Antonio Méndez Padrón). In the audience was Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg, the president of the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation in Austria. He offered Méndez his aid in turning the orchestra into an ongoing project, and the orchestra and the Lyceum Mozartiano de La Habana cultural center were founded in 2009 with support from the Foundation. The orchestra was organized on a volunteer basis, with Méndez receiving a salary of about $55 a month for conducting the group and also serving as deputy director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba and teaching at Havana's University of the Arts. One violinist played on an instrument strung with salvaged telephone wire.

The orchestra's international reputation came about in stages. One of these was a Havana performance in 2015 by pianist Simone Dinnerstein. She had been recruited by her teacher, Solomon Mikowsky, who was Cuban American and had maintained contacts on the island. Fascinated by the group's spirit, Dinnerstein (although she spoke no Spanish) organized U.S. performances and recorded the album Mozart in Havana with the orchestra, issued in 2017 by the Sony Classical label. By that time, the orchestra had already taken another step forward; in 2016, with help from Germany's Balthasar Neumann Ensemble and its patrons, including the Goethe Institute, the Havana Lyceum Orchestra became a professional group. The orchestra recorded an album, Mozart y Mambo, in Germany, a process that was chronicled in a documentary broadcast on Germany's Deutsche Welle and Unitel networks. The Havana Lyceum Orchestra toured such major German summer venues as the Rheingau Music Festival, the Darmstadt Residence Festival, and the Elbphilharmonie Sommer in Hamburg, and the Mozart y Mambo: Cuban Dances album was issued internationally in 2022 on the Alpha label. ~ James Manheim, Rovi