Mimi Dye & TOPAZ perform Sacred Sounds with Rodney Gehrke, Jim Kansau February 1, 2009

Mimi Dye and TOPAZ will Perform 'Sacred Sounds' with Guests Rodney Gehrke and Jimmy Kansau. Rodney Gehrke, All Saints' new music director and organist, and Jimmy Kansau, tenor soloist, will be joining Mimi Dye, violist, for this beautiful and meditative concert. Sacred music by St. Hildegard of Bingen, Vaughan Willliams, Bach, Britten and traditional Norwegian Hardenger fiddle tunes will be featured. Includes an elegant reception.

Mimi Dye, violist, composer and Artistic Director of TOPAZ, is well known to Bay Area audiences as a soloist, chamber musician, and jazz performer. Ms. Dye's compositions include an album of solo viola works ("Angel Songs of Mimi Dye"), two chamber jazz suites ("Gracias a Dios and Paradise Dreams"), two jazz tunes, and a song for youth chorus and orchestra ("Twinkling Stars Trumpeting.") Ms. Dye has released three of her own CDs, "Spiritual Song of Hildegard," "Mimi's Classical Favorites" and "Angel Songs of Mimi Dye," and an album of her own original world/jazz compositions, "River in the Sun."

Rodney Gehrke is director of music at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, organist and choir director at San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El, undergraduate organ instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, and adjunct lecturer in church music and liturgy at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley. Mr. Gehrke has performed and recorded with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and has also made two recordings of Mexican Baroque music with Chanticleer, with whom he toured the Southwest and Mexico in 1998. More recently he has performed with the American Bach Soloists as continuo organist and harpsichordist.

Jimmy Kansau, a native of Merida, Venezuela, is a tenor who recently finished his Masters Degree (2002) and his Post Graduate Diploma (2004) at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and is frequently heard on the stages of the western United States.

$25 in advance; $30 at door; rsvp at 650-380-0961 or www.topazmusic.org.

Official Website: http://www.topazmusic.org