Pianist Thrives on Sudden Sticky Wicketts : Classical music: She will fill in for the originally announced Jean-Yves Thibaudet on Monday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

In March, the phone rang in pianist Helene Wickett’s Northern California home. The management of the Minnesota Symphony wanted to know whether she could play Mozart’s Concerto No. 27 with the orchestra and conductor Edo de Waart--on 24 hours’ notice.

Wickett said yes. Such is the life of a professional trying to make a career from the West Coast.

“It was lots of fun,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Redwood City, San Mateo County. “It gave me a wonderful sense of accomplishment.”

She had more time--about two months--when Micah Levy, music director of the Orange County Chamber Orchestra, called her to fill in for the originally announced Jean-Yves Thibaudet at a concert Monday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

What had happened to Thibaudet? “It didn’t work out,” Levy said. “I’d rather not say more than that.”

(David Hamilton, Thibaudet’s agent in New York, confirmed that “there was a lot of discussion about that date. But in the end, the contract didn’t work out. . . . The artist was willing to uphold his end of the offer. There has been no discussion about rescheduling the date. He has a date in Orange County in 1991.”)

Wickett will actually be making her return engagement with Levy and the orchestra. As a Pro Musicis Foundation artist, she played Beethoven’s Second Concerto with them in 1987.

Wickett said coming back is “business and pleasure, both. I enjoyed working with Micah several years ago. Making a career while living on the West Coast is very difficult and also an endless challenge. But when things do come to you, you feel that you’ve really earned them. . . . I play as well as I can, and one concert leads to another.”

Born outside of San Francisco, Wickett, 35, moved to Europe in her early teens. Her teachers included Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Alfred Brendel in Vienna and Robert Casadesus in France.

“My schooling was very unorthodox,” she said. “I went to San Francisco Conservatory as kid, then I was taken to Europe when I was 13 and spent three years there. I never went to high school.

“I went to Stanford (University) for a year, in a field totally outside music, when I was 16. At the end of that year, I started getting concerts. I decided I had to make a career choice: either going on with a career or going on with college. I took a big gamble and took the career.”

Regarding the Beethoven Fourth Concerto--described by composer Robert Schumann as a “slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants,” the Third and Fifth Concertos--Wickett said the restrained work is “actually quite difficult.”

“You have to be quite powerful to play the piece well,” she said. “All the quick runs happen at strategic points in the first movement. You have to produce quite a lot of sound going against a large-scale sound from the orchestra. Simply from a purely physical point of view, there is a lot of work with it.”

Levy’s 32-piece orchestra should make that a bit easier. But it raises questions about how much impact the piece can make.

“I’d much rather adjust in this direction than make the compromises which a very large orchestra and a 3,000-seat hall require,” Wickett said. “It’s much easier to scale down, rather than go for the large effects that our large halls necessitate sometimes. I have no qualms at all about scaling down.

“Any concerto should be an oversize chamber-music kind of concert, in any case, in that there are times when you are more important, and there are times that they are. You listen and adapt to circumstances.”

When asked how much she practices every day, Wickett said simply: “Long hours. There are no shortcuts at all.”

But she doesn’t practice scales or technical exercises. “I haven’t done any purely technical exercises since I was 9 or 10 years old,” she said. “Most are a waste of time. However, as you play the repertory, you’re forced to address every conceivable problem there is in a far more effective way than any mechanical exercise could provide.”

On the day of a concert, Wickett fights “a constant battle between being sufficiently well rested and wishing I had another three weeks to practice.

“You have to be fresh and concentrated and think positive, and if you’re not prepared, nothing will help you. Once you’ve accomplished these two things, though, it’s not entirely in your hands, either. A certain amount of luck is involved.”

Among the factors she enumerated are the quality of the piano, the mood of the audience and the acoustics of the hall.

“The hardest thing, however, is that from the stage, you can’t hear what goes into the hall,” she said. “It can really be guesswork. And very often you wind up getting reviewed. From the audience perception, they’ll hear the acoustics and be affected by a lousy acoustic, instead of the details of a performance.”

In earlier seasons, the Orange County Chamber Orchestra played concerts at Loyola Marymount in Orange on Sunday afternoons and at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa on Monday nights.

Levy said that he has lost subscribers by consolidating their five-concert season on Mondays at the new Irvine theater.

“A lot of people came on Sundays,” Levy said. “A third of our total audience was on Sundays. So now we asked them to switch to a different location, to a different time and a different day. We’ve picked up a few new ones but haven’t begun to make up from the lost. In the long run, it will be better for us. But there’s also the short run.

“I’m very hopeful. I feel very optimistic about this whole thing. But, of course, I always have sleepless nights. I guess it’s a combination of both.”

In other orchestra news:

-- Thanks to a $25,000, two-year matching grant from the James Irvine Foundation, the orchestra has hired its first executive director, Cathy Griesmeyer, an arts manager from Caspar, Wyo., Levy said. The grant was specifically to hire an executive director.

“Basically, the plan is to have her concentrate on raising money and selling more tickets,” Levy said. “As time goes on and she raises more money, she will be able to develop a staff.” Levy said the orchestra will operate on a $100,000 budget, the same as last year.

-- The orchestra has expanded to about 32 musicians for the season. Last year, the orchestra averaged 25. How will that affect repertory such as the Beethoven Seventh Symphony on Monday?

“Back in that period of time, orchestras were not necessarily huge,” Levy said. “That doesn’t mean that they didn’t want larger orchestras. We will have a different sound. It’s not going to sound like a 100-piece orchestra. It will be a lighter sound. And who knows, maybe that’s fitting for this piece.”

Micah Levy will conduct the Orange County Chamber Orchestra in a Beethoven program at 8 p.m. on Monday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Soloist will be pianist Helene Wickett. Tickets: $11 to $22. Information: (714) 538-8391.