FALLS CHURCH, Virginia -- Each year at Thanksgiving American Lynn Gaubatz goes down into the crypt and plays her heart out.

In this holiday tradition, Lynn trades football and turkey for Wienerschnitzel and Glühwein, flying to Austria to perform concerts to benefit families in India. Her "Concerts for India" take place in the crypt beneath St. Joseph’s Carmelite Church in Linz, Austria during Thanksgiving week. This year’s performance will be November 26, 2004 at 7:30 pm.

Lynn will perform the world première of a new work for the bassoon by Danish composer Ivar Danielsen. On her "Concerts for India" in 2002 and 2003, Lynn performed the world premières of two of the five works composed especially for her by composer Fritz Berens, an Austrian composer who fled the Nazis in 1939.

"The Carmelite friars and priests in Austria have a wonderful tradition of helping the people of India," says Lynn. "I can’t think of a better way to spend Thanksgiving than by playing gorgeous music in a magical setting for such a good cause." The crypt, damaged and desecrated when taken over during World War II for use by the occupying Nazi army, was recently renovated after decades of disuse and now houses concerts, prayer meetings, and art exhibitions.

Besides her career as one of classical music’s most brilliant soloists, Lynn is an avid literacy activist who gives benefit concerts in Europe and the US for schools and libraries worldwide. Her literacy promotion website "AdoptALibrary.org", an Internet clearinghouse of organizations that help libraries, prisons, Indian reservations, and schools around the world by encouraging and facilitating the donation of books and equipment is a smash success.

"Woman’s World" magazine and hundreds of newspapers throughout the US, from an editorial in Bigfork, Montana to "Hints from Heloise", have featured AdoptALibrary.org, which has had over 200,000 visitors who have donated many thousands of books (and not a few dollars!). Innovative in both music and her literacy activism, Lynn ran a competition to find the most clever and eco-friendly uses for old National Geographic magazines.

Named "One of America's Ten Most Outstanding Young Working Women" by GLAMOUR Magazine, Lynn has wowed audiences on four continents - North and South America, Europe and Africa - including virtuoso solo performances in Vienna, Salzburg, New York, Seville, Málaga, Caracas, Chicago, Washington, and Boston. She has performed at music festivals around the world, including Aspen, Tanglewood and Wolf Trap, where she played the bassoon on stage in costume in Mozart's Don Giovanni. She has played principal bassoon in Austria, Germany, Spain, Venezuela and the U.S. under Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Sir Georg Solti, among others.

One of Lynn’s musical passions is her search for survivors and descendants of the victims of the Holocaust who were composers, to bring to light the forgotten music of these artists. Through her research, she is finding and performing music that was banned by the Nazi regime, much of it never before published or heard. On the 56^th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, she performed an Entartete Musik concert, including two works by Czech composer Karel Reiner who survived Terezín, Auschwitz, and was at Dachau at its liberation, for a worldwide broadcast audience from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. On May 18, 2000 she performed the world première of a solo piece by Eric Zeisl, in conjunction with an article she wrote about the composer in Austria Kultur and on August 28, 2000 Lynn performed as soloist the world broadcast première of Eric Zeisl’s The Good Old Time on a worldwide Internet webcast from the Kennedy Center.

She was the only musician invited to perform at the International Holocaust Conference in Vienna, Austria in 1999, where she performed a solo work by exiled Viennese composer Egon Wellesz at the official reception given by the Burgermeister of Vienna and she performed as soloist at the award ceremony for an international Peace Prize in Trondheim, Norway. Lynn’s performances have been broadcast worldwide on radio and TV by The Voice of America, CBS, PBS, Radio Nacional de España, and Radio Nacional de Venezuela, and she's the only bassoonist ever featured by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC on their lecture series Art of the Virtuosi and The Concert Experience.

Lynn taught at the world_renowned Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria from 1982 to 1984, and has given master classes in Salzburg, Seville, Malaga, Caracas, Boston, Washington, Madison, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. She also performs "crossover" concerts featuring the works of composers who composed both classical and popular music, including Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, and Alec Wilder.

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