No-one was more surprised than Stefan Vladar when he won a major international piano competition. The Viennese pianist/conductor's world changed overnight, and he hasn't looked back since, writes Michael Dervan.

As Stefan Vladar tells it, the most important developments in his musical life just happened to fall into place. He was only 19 when he won an international piano competition - the first one he'd entered - and he got a break as a conductor before he'd even conducted his first concert.

His parents were music-lovers but not musicians, yet music was the career he always knew he would follow, even though he was anything but a child prodigy. And he seems fulfilled by what he's achieved, not in the sense that he set out in life with extravagant goals which he's now reached, but rather as someone who, by modestly responding to the challenges he's met in life and music, has ended up with a plate that's rewardingly full.

His earliest real break, it seems, was not a public one. It was simply that, after two years, the old lady who was his first piano teacher had the sensitivity to realise that he needed a better teacher and also had the generosity to act on this understanding.

But his development, while steady, doesn't seem to have been spectacular. For a while, he thought about becoming an actor, and he studied the organ for a number of years, but realised it wasn't for him, because of the lack of a substantial body of core, 19th-century romantic repertoire. So, by his own account, in his late teens he was just another piano student in Vienna who hadn't really given much thought to the cut-throat world of music competitions.

When he entered the Beethoven Competition in Vienna in 1985 it was because his teacher, Hans Petermandl, had suggested it.

"Even before I had started thinking about competitions, I did this one, and I won, and then the chapter was closed. I never thought about doing another one." As a result of winning the competition, everything changed.

"It changed from me being a talented student at this particular school in Vienna. Nobody outside this school knew that I was there. Suddenly, after the competition, I was someone. The competition was very big in Austria, it was televised. I got engagements for concerts, which would have been unthinkable the day before."

Winning a competition, of course, is only the start. From the outside it may seem that someone who takes a first prize has it all made. The truth, however, is rather different.

"At the time I won the competition, my repertoire consisted of four piano concertos, and I had maybe three recital programmes. I was never a child prodigy. When I was 14 I didn't play the Brahms Paganini Variations, I played Czerny studies. After winning the competition, I had to learn all the repertoire. I learned about 30 piano concertos in 10 years. That was the difficult time. It's not easy to be nobody and then become famous. All the expectations are there, as if you'd been in the business for years and years."

So it was only after the competition success that the hardest work of all began.

"There are so many competitions nowadays. Nobody is really waiting for the first prize-winners any more. They wait maybe for the first prizewinner of the Chopin, maybe Rubinstein, maybe Tchaikovsky, Van Cliburn, Queen Elisabeth. Nobody waits for the first prizewinner of the Beethoven Competition. The pressure on the competition winners is extremely high. Because, usually the career after the competition lasts six months. And then you see the curriculums of all the competition winners, they have 12 first prizes, 10 first prizes, eight first prizes, and no career, because nobody wants to hear them.

"I was lucky. But I must also say that I took time. I didn't want to be world famous a week after the competition. I started slowly, and that's, I think, what made it at least lasting . . ."

Winning a Beethoven competition, of course, did mean he found himself channelled into a rather narrow band of repertoire. But, fortunately, that was an effect which wore off. "I'm not the kind of pianist who plays from Couperin to Messiaen, or to Ligeti and Stockhausen. My repertoire is narrower than that, and the narrower the repertoire of a pianist gets, the more important Beethoven becomes. There are only five other names, or 10 or 12 or whatever."

It's not always easy for a performer to analyse the components of their own success. Vladar is clear on some issues, but not on others.

"In the first place, my success started in Austria, because I was everybody's darling. I was a young, good-looking guy - sorry to say, times change as you can see - and I was on TV, which makes a big impression. And then, I don't know, people like to go to my concerts, I don't know why.

"I think the most important thing in music-making, and it's what I've tried to do from the very beginning, is to make people listen. They don't only listen because they bought a ticket and they're sitting there. You have to make them listen. There are several ways of making them listen.

"You can try to be different - you look different, you try to be the shy boy, or the sportsman, or whatever. Or you have something that makes people listen, and that's what I think I somehow have."

Conducting was development which just seemed like a natural move to make. Most of the music his father had introduced him to was orchestral repertoire.

"My musical horizon was always much bigger than just the piano. I thought, why don't I try to do what I've always wanted to do, in a way. Whatever you do with the piano, it's still just the piano. With conducting, I started, very privately, 12 years ago, to do concerts with a chamber orchestra from Slovakia that I'd recorded the Beethoven concertos with.

"I had started my own festival at the age of 23, so I invited them to the festival, and that's how I learned. I didn't do it a lot, but I did it steadily. The first thing I did was a Mozart programme.

"The first orchestra rehearsal in my life that I did was in 1990, in Bratislava. And there was a Japanese agent at this rehearsal who'd just signed a contract with the orchestra for a tour in 1991, 18 concerts.

"After the signing of the contract he went to the rehearsal. And after the rehearsal he asked me to do the tour with them."

This story sounds all the more remarkable, when you consider that Vladar had never formally studied conducting or even taken a single lesson in advance of that Bratislava encounter. He had, however, attended lots of orchestral rehearsals with his brother, who had studied conducting. So they had both sat in on rehearsals of the Vienna Philharmonic, and had travelled to Munich to attend the rehearsals of the legendary Romanian conductor, Sergiu Celibidache.

"Then, when I started playing with orchestras, I always watched very carefully in the rehearsals - what is he doing, and what is he getting for what he is doing? And I talked a lot to conductors, and to musicians in orchestras.

"Conducting is not about showing power. The conductor has to have the bigger picture. Therefore he's responsible for most of the ideas. But it doesn't mean that he is the general, and the others are all the soldiers.

It's work that we do together, and it's very fascinating to work on the score with the musicians, letting them know what the bigger picture is all about, because they don't always know. Most of the time, they know a lot, when you're dealing with basic repertoire. But it's very interesting to tell them your picture, and see what they do with it."

And for his debut with the Irish Chamber Orchestra Vladar will be discussing the bigger picture of works by Rossini (the String Sonata No. 6), Barber (the Adagio), and Shostakovich (the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a). He'll also be combining his two roles, as soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto in A, K414.

The major challenge for the modern conductor, he says, is often the amount of rehearsal time. Usually it's too short.

"The decision is not what do I want to work on, but what do I have to work on in the time available."

On the other hand, if there's plenty of time, the issue will be whether the conductor has enough of a bigger picture to fill all of the time with constructive work. Given the combination of repertoire and rehearsal time for his ICO debut, the challenge he faces this time is likely to be the latter one.

"I want to have enough rehearsals. But you never know in advance how many rehearsals you need. That's the problem. You don't know how quickly the musicians will pick up what you want them to do. You never in advance know how difficult everything is for every player. You never know."

Stefan Vladar's tour with the ICO opens at the University Concert Hall, in Limerick, tomorrow, with further appearances at the Glór Irish Music Centre, in Ennis, on Saturday, and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin, on Sunday afternoon