Lera Auerbach's many talents have taken her from Siberia to New York. She talks to Arminta Wallace ahead of two Irish performances

Some people seem to have it all, and some people seem to have it all - and then some. Meet Lera Auerbach. She is a pianist who has performed at the world's top recital venues. She is a composer who has had works commissioned by a plethora of international artists, including Gidon Kremer, the Tokyo String Quartet and the Royal Danish Ballet, and is currently composer-in-residence at the Bremen Music Festival. Oh, and she is a poet who, in 1996, was named Poet of the Year by the Pushkin Society, and whose work is required reading on modern literature courses in Russian schools and universities.

As if all that weren't enough, Auerbach is just 33 years old and looks, if the photos on her website are a reliable guide, like a fashion model 10 years younger. This week three of her works will be performed by the National Chamber Choir as part of its summer series, Eros and Thanatos (Love and Death) and, under the auspices of Critical Voices, she will give pre-concert talks about her life and work in both Dublin and Belfast.

It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I dial the number of this Über-Wunderkind in her adopted city of New York - only to find myself talking to a personable and engagingly frank young woman. With her myriad interests in the worlds of literature and music, I can't resist asking which came first for Auerbach, words or music?

"I don't really know," she says. "The music came first. I started writing music when I was very little. Poetry came much later. So I would say that music was my first language. But for me now, it's not more important than literature. It's like if you have to choose between your children: which one is your favourite? It's not possible."

Auerbach was born in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Ural Mountains close to Siberia. It sounds like a desolate place, but the picture she paints of her childhood shows quite a different scene.

"Chelyabinsk is a big city," she says. "So I didn't exactly grow up in the mountains, although my family would go into the countryside every year and spend the summer there. But otherwise it was very much in the city. My parents created a wonderful atmosphere at home. It was a world of books, of literature, of music. My mother was a piano teacher, and music was constantly present in the house. I have lots of happy memories."

Those early years gave her a lasting love of books and writing, and especially of modern Russian poetry.

"In the 20th century there were some absolutely incredible breakthroughs to a new level of language, of expression, by poets such as Marina Tsvetaeva and Josef Brodsky, and also by prose writers such as Nabokov and Bulgakov," she says.

Nevertheless, Auerbach chose to leave Russia in 1991 - under somewhat dramatic circumstances. At the age of 17 she was invited to perform in the United States and, like many a precocious young Soviet artist before her, was assigned a KGB "minder". But after clashing over the restrictions placed on her movements, Auerbach gave her minder the slip.

"When no one was around, I literally ran away," she says.

IT WASN'T as easy as it sounds. There she was, a Russian teenager on her own in New York with no money and very little English. "It was actually my very first trip by myself," she recalls. "I had one contact, the telephone number of a person my mum knew, and who had come to the US a few years earlier."

The contact turned up trumps. He introduced her to a conductor, who arranged an audition with people from the Manhattan School of Music - which promptly offered Auerbach a place.

"Everything really happened in one day," she says. "The difficult part was to make the decision to stay, but also, of course, I had to call my parents and ask them what to do. At that time in Russia, we didn't really know . . . I mean, there was perestroika, but it was very much isolated and we didn't know what would happen. So we didn't really know if we would see each other again - and if we would, when would it be. But my parents were wonderful. They said this was a decision I had to make on my own. They would not tell me what to do, but they would be supportive of whatever decision I chose. Which was very, very brave."

It was three years before she saw her parents again. But why - given her happy life in Russia and an environment that nurtured her imagination - did she defect? "Being accepted to the conservatory was the main factor. If I went back to Russia, I didn't know if they would let me out again, and I just felt, if I don't take this chance I will not be feeling right afterwards. For a couple of years prior to that, I started to sense a feeling of . . . dead end, so to speak. I felt that I had learned whatever I could learn from the culture. There was a need for me to explore."

She has certainly done that. Auerbach has been composer in residence at prestigious festivals in Europe, Japan and the US, and her performing career continues apace. In the years 2000 and 2004, she was invited by the International Johannes Brahms Foundation to live and work at the composer's house in Baden-Baden.

"It's very inspiring and it's in a very beautiful part of Germany," she says. "There's a lot of material about Brahms, and Clara Schumann's house is also not too far away. There are so many great artists who lived in this area, and so somehow there is a special energy."

And she is particularly tuned into 19th- century music, is she not?

"Not necessarily . . ." she says.

But I've read that her compositions have an affinity with the Romantic style.

"Ah. That's a misunderstanding. I love baroque music and 20th-century music. So actually the 19th century is the dark ages for me! There are a few 19th-century works that I love as a pianist, but it's not my favourite period in art."

THERE IS, for all that, something a bit Brahms about the titles of the Auerbach works which the National Chamber Choir will perform in Dublin and Belfast: Three Choral Pieces: Lullaby, opus 66; Psalm 130; Psalm 23.

"The lullaby is based on William Blake's Cradle Song, and it's for a cappella choir," she says. As for the psalm settings, "I was always attracted to the idea of making a large cycle of psalms. I haven't yet, but those two perhaps one day will be part of the cycle. I chose those two because of how I felt about the text. The power of these poems is that they can connect very individually to every person who comes in contact with them. So I tried to have my own relationship with them."

It's worth a bet that they won't sound much like Brahms, then.

The National Chamber Choir, conducted by Celso Antunes, will perform music by Lera Auerbach, along with pieces by Schumann, Sergey Taneyev and Bartok at The Harty Room, Queen's University, Belfast tonight and at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, tomorrow. Pre-concert interviews with Auerbach at 7pm in Belfast and at 5.45pm in Dublin