To be young and fearless.

Byline: Fred Crafts The Register-Guard

Imagine being 13 years old and making your debut as a piano soloist with the New York Philharmonic. You'd be a basket case, right?

Not so, says Helen Huang, who did just that. Not a big deal, she thought at the time.

Which is not what she thinks these days, however, now that she is a battle-worn veteran of 21. Now, thinking back, she gets a bit nervous over it all.

"It didn't really hit me when I was younger," Huang says by cell phone from the Juilliard School in New York City, where she is a senior.

"I just went there, and I played my things. And it didn't occur to me where I was and who I was working with. It wasn't until maybe one or two years ago that I thought, `Oh, my gosh, this is quite something,' '

Indeed, it is.

On Thursday, she will perform Wolfgang Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with the Eugene Symphony Orchestra. In the opinion of conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, she is one of the world's foremost interpreters of Mozart's music.

Huang takes the compliment graciously.

"I just happen to have an affinity for Mozart," she says. "It just worked out that way. Not by any kind of careful planning. But if anybody asks me to play a Mozart concerto, I'm there. No question about it."

Among the many orchestras who have asked Huang to perform with them are - besides the New York Philharmonic - the Berlin Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, National Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Israel Chamber Orchestra.

What's more, Huang has performed with the Israel Philharmonic, Cincinnati Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, KBS Symphony in Seoul and Vienna Chamber Orchestra and at the Taipei International Chamber Music Festival in Taiwan.

The conductors she has worked with include Kurt Masur, Pinchas Zukerman and Jesus Lopez-Cobos.

She won her first competition before her 6th birthday and was barely 13 when she became the youngest recipient ever of an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Her recordings are available on the Teldec label.

Although she quickly found herself in the rarefied air of the classical music world, she was not fazed by it.

"When you're younger, you mindlessly go into things, and you're just having your fun. You don't really think too much about the pressures of the industry or the repercussions of what you do," she says.

"But once I hit 19 or 20, it was like, `Oh. This is actually a business.' Sometimes I wish that hadn't occurred to me."

A child prodigy, Huang began taking piano lessons just before she was 5 years old. Born in Japan of Chinese parents in October 1982, she moved to Cherry Hill, N.J., with her family in 1985 and began piano lessons two years later. Within a year she had won her first competition.

Her first public appearances were with orchestras in the Philadelphia area. Just after her 8th birthday, she made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra after winning its student concerto competition. She also won the New York Philharmonic's Young Performers Auditions and performed with the orchestra, under music director Masur, in December 1992.

All this got started because Huang grew up listening to her older sisters - they are seven and nine years older than she is - making music around the house.

"I would attend their concerts and their lessons, just because I was a little girl and I had nothing better to do," Huang recalls, adding that her mother, an elementary school teacher, taught her how to read music.

"I would sit at the piano for hours on end and just sort of play at it. It was like my toy. And I think just doing that - through being surrounded by music and being taken to concerts - I found an interest in it on my own."

Then came the piano lessons. By good luck, a neighbor, Yoheved Kaplinsky, taught piano. When she later taught at the Manhattan School of Music, then the Juilliard School, Huang followed her.

"Had I not been fortunate enough to meet her, my life would have taken a very different path. Musically, she nurtured me in a way that I can't see any one else doing," Huang says.

As for the competitions she won, Huang apparently never took them too seriously.

"I just sort of went for the hell of it," she says with a laugh, "and ended up winning."

Her life, then, has been "a bunch of crazy incidents where one led to another. And here I am now."

And where exactly is she, now? As she graduates from school in May and transitions into a full-time professional career as a soloist, observers wonder if she can make the leap from child prodigy to mature musician. Can she handle the pressure of stardom?

"The important thing for me," she says, "is to continue to seek joy in it and to make sure that this is something that does indeed bring me more happiness than it does stress.

``And if that's the case, then I know I'm doing the right thing, and I'm in it for the right reason.''

CONCERT PREVIEW

Eugene Symphony Orchestra

What: The Eugene Symphony, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, performs Arvo Part's ``Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,'' W.A. Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 (with soloist Helen Huang) and Richard Strauss' ``Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life)''

When: 8 p.m. Thursday

Where: The Hult Center, Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street

How much: $15 to $36, through the Hult Center box office (682-5000)

Free preview: Guerrero and Huang will give a lecture-demonstration at noon Wednesday in the Hult Center's Studio One

CAPTION(S):

Helen Huang is the featured soloist with the Eugene Symphony this week, playing W.A. Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24. ``I just happen to have an affinity for Mozart. ... If anybody asks me to play a Mozart concerto, I'm there.''