Lise de la Salle's recent CD release "Piano Concertos No. 1" is, in some ways, autobiographical.

The young French pianist said she chose the first piano concertos of Shostakovich, Lizst and Prokofiev partly because "you can really feel the happiness, and the fact that they are young."

The same could be said of la Salle herself. At 19, la Salle has just released an album — "Mozart / Prokofiev" — that was named Editor's Choice for The Gramophone of August 2007. She has already graduated from the Paris Conservatoire Superieur de Musique, and keeps up a busy international concert career peppered with such stops as Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.

"This season is very busy with two releases," she said by phone from Paris. "I have a lot of concerts in relation with this program, and very, very big season with lots of very important cities."

It's a balancing act, trying to maintain performances in Tokyo, New York and Munich while also saving some time for herself. "I also want time for my friends and my family. I want time to read and to listen to other kinds of music. Also, I think it's very important to be open-minded — and to explore the cultural and global events of now and also of the time of the composer I am playing."

She's also trying to learn her personal repertoire — which, she adds, takes time and cannot be rushed.

La Salle's public life began when she was 9 with a live broadcast on Radio-France. Then, after a few years away from the spotlight, her professional life really took off when she was 14 and made her first CD. "Also at the time, I met my manager and I began to be more serious with more concerts."

She also won the prestigious Young Artists Competition in New York, which offers three years of management. It was through this agency that conductor Keith Lockhart met la Salle.

"I first worked with her when they did their big fund-raising gala, I guess two Januaries ago, and she is just amazing," Lockhart said.

Lockhart will be conducting her in a Utah Symphony program next Friday. "She's doing the Liszt Piano concerto No. 1, the same piece that I did with her on that concert. She was 17 at the time and had just amazing technique, great music making — she makes the Liszt look easy, which is not easy."

La Salle said she really loves this piece because "you can see all Lizst in this concerto. It's a very important piece, and actually Liszt worked on this piece for more than two years, so it was not a little piece. And already you can really see every aspect of Liszt in this piece. Already you have very dramatic aspects, very melodic, very passionate, very fast, and quite difficult."

Also on the concert, said Lockhart, will be the Rossini Cenerentola overture ("nice, light, summery fare") and the two sets of Respighi tone poems. "I think the Pines of Rome is just a perfect outdoor piece," he said. "It's so evocative of nature, it seems perfect to do it in such a beautiful setting. So, again, I'm really looking forward to that concert."

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