From obscurity to Carnegie Hall

Irish pianist Isabelle O'Connell has lived the joke about Carnegie Hall: she will give her début concert there at the end of this month. But in addition to long hours of practising, her talent, dedication and and a portion of good luck have brought her early recognition, writes Aminta Wallace

It's half-past eight on a grey January morning, and there's a rush-hour queue revving tetchily out on Highfield Road. Definitely not a good time for jokes - not even the one where a New York traffic cop is asked, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" and answers, "Carnegie Hall? Lady, you gotta practise, practise, practise . . . "

But for one young Dublin pianist the joke is oddly apt - and the practising appears to be over. Isabelle O'Connell is scheduled to make her début at the famous New York concert venue at the end of the month. She is also scheduled to be on a plane to the US by lunch-time, which is why we are in the sitting-room of her Rathgar home discussing matters musical at half-past eight in the morning.

She perches on the edge of a chair, apparently unconcerned about the half-packed suitcase lurking upstairs in her bedroom. She's 25, but looks even younger. "I thought I'd have a bit more practising to do, actually," she says. "I didn't think anything like this would happen quite so soon."

So how does an unknown Irish pianist get to Carnegie Hall? Practising is hardly even the half of it. There's talent, of course, and dedication, and probably a generous helping of luck. But you also need to be clear-headed enough to recognise an opportunity when you get one - and then courageous enough to grab it with both hands, and hang on tight.

O'Connell arrived in New York in August 1999 with enough money to survive until the following September. She had been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the Manhattan College of Music, but was going to need additional funding to make it through a two-year master's degree course in one of the world's most expensive cities.

"I remember having conversations with my mother in this room," she says, glancing around at the bookshelves, the piano, the Christmas decorations shimmering in the light reflected from the fire, "wondering, 'Do I take the chance? Am I gonna find the money? Will I survive?' And I ended up saying, 'Well, even if I only stay for three months, it's better than not going at all'. I left Dublin the morning after I did a concert at the National Concert Hall. I was on a high. The next day I had no family, no friends and jet lag."

O'Connell quickly settled into the Big Apple social scene, helped by uncommonly sociable accommodation at International House in uptown Manhattan. "It's a dorm, really, with 700 students. It's fantastic. You meet people from everywhere. I have my own tiny cubicle." She also found the musical atmosphere at her college lively and stimulating, "not cut-throat like at some conservatoires, but they still keep the standards extremely high".

But if it sounds like a bohemian idyll - Fame minus the legwarmers - there was still the grimly realistic business of balancing the books, money-wise.

"I love New York. It's a great place. But at the beginning, I had to focus on finding sponsors, writing letters, all that. It took a lot of time away from practising, which wasn't good.

"Eventually I got some private sponsors, and then, in the second year, I got the Bank of Ireland millennium scholarship - and that just helped so much. It took away the whole burden."

The opportunity to audition for the Carnegie Hall gig came during her final months of study, courtesy of Artists International Presentations, Inc. "There are hundreds of applicants - not just pianists, but singers and chamber groups and all sorts. They select a number of people out of that. I had to prepare a work from each musical period, so I played a Beethoven sonata, some Liszt, some Debussy, a sonata by Samuel Barber - in total an hour of music, though the audition was about 50 minutes."

An hour of music, a 50-minute audition - what do the judges do, stop a pianist in full flow with cries of "Enough already!"?

O'Connell grins her gamine grin. "Basically, yeah. Auditions in New York tend to be like that. They don't have the time to hear every one." Like many before them, however, they heard something special in O'Connell's playing, and her presentation concert at Carnegie Hall is set for January 31st. The programme opens with a Chaconne by Sofia Gubaidulina, followed by Janacek and Liszt, and closes with two short pieces by Philip Martin and the Barber sonata.

"It's sort of unconventional," she says. "Most people play Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and, if they're really adventurous, some Prokofiev."

Dublin audiences will get a sneak preview when she plays "just the 20th-century bits" at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday at noon. Then it's back to New York for a recital at St Paul's chapel at the beginning of March. "It's one of a series of concerts they have in the chapel, which is a block away from where the World Trade Centre was." She bites her lip. There it is: September 11th. It slips into every conversation about New York. "It was a tough time," she says. "It's weird, thinking back. There's such a difference between what it was like before and after."

New York may well prove to be as formative an influence on O'Connell as any of the teachers who have steered her pianistic course since she began to study at the age of six: Brenda Wilkes at Alexandra College, Terese Fahy and Reamonn Keary at the RIAM , Nina Svetlanova at the Manhattan College of Music. At the moment she's still taking lessons in New York with Zitta Zohar - but then, how do you know when you stop being a piano student and start being a pianist?

"That's a difficult question. I think people sort of phase it out," she says. "Of course, with music you never really finish learning. For the next few years, I think I'm gonna take the odd lesson, in the form of master classes. It's nice to have some sort of guidance. But at some point you have to learn how to teach yourself."

Isabelle O'Connell plays at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Parnell Square, Dublin on Sunday at noon.