For Cora Venus Lunny, RTE Musician of the Future 1998, and Irish entrant in the recent Eurovision Young Musician Competition in Vienna, the path to success seems to have been pretty smooth. "I started when I was three. My Mom thought I would like to play the violin. I did, and I stuck with it. I couldn't imagine doing anything else. For me, at three, it was just fun. It's like if you give a child pencil and paper, it draws a picture. Same thing for me - creativity, fun, relaxed, cool."

Of course, neither the fun youngsters have playing the fiddle, nor the amount of time they spend practising it, is any guarantee that they will choose music as a profession. Cora says she can't really say when she first knew for certain that she would become a violinist. "I can't quite remember ever having really wanted to do anything else, or having considered doing anything else. But it wasn't the case that I was supposed to be a violinist when I started at three. It just somehow happened that I decided that was it, at some stage."

She fights shy of identifying any pieces as landmarks that might have fired her up to thinking of violin-playing as a career. "I don't know. I always wanted to play pieces that I couldn't play yet, and that made me want to work harder so that I'd be able to play them. I was always trying to be better than I was."

Paganini, Lunny's choice at the National Concert Hall twice already this year, she explains, is not really her main thing. "Well, Paganini was a great violinist and a legend, and his concertos are very good for showing technical ability, and they're also very pretty. But really, I prefer to play other things rather than Paganini, like Beethoven and Brahms. That's more my taste, but I love Paganini as well." In Galway she's going to play Grieg, Falla and a new work by Rob Canning, RTE Composer of the Future, 1998. When we spoke, she hadn't seen the new piece yet, but the short preparation time didn't seem to be bothering her in the slightest. This is hardly surprising, given her answer to my question about what she finds hardest about playing the violin. "Fifths. Because I have thin fingers. I don't find much else about it too difficult. Interpretationally, or in terms of memory, or anything, it's easy for me." Fifths! Most young violinists might have specified intervals that require stretching, like octaves or tenths, or some of the trickier techniques of bowing control. Fifths simply involve placing your finger where it covers two of the strings at the same time. Yet, when I drew her out about composers, she admitted that "Mozart is the biggest mystery for me at the moment. Because, well, I don't quite understand . . . I don't know how to bring it out yet. I mean, I do understand it, but oh God, how will I say this . . . it's so light and free, but it's also technically quite hard. He did a lot of things over five notes instead of four, so you have to do all sorts of weird fingerings. Mozart is so light, you have to make it sound like real music as well, and not just like it's light." At the other end of the scale, she's emphatic about declaring Beethoven as her favourite composer. And favourite violinists? "Unfortunately, dead ones more than any. David Oistrakh is, for me the greatest violinist ever. Number One. Everything. I love Oistrakh. I also like Heifetz, who's so different from Oistrakh. You couldn't have two violinists more different. And then Szeryng. Kreisler, as well."

Pressed to extend the list to the living, she names Kyung-Wha Chung and "from my generation" Maxim Vengerov, who, as she points out, will be making his Dublin debut in January.

She likes Oistrakh because it's the composer he's more concerned about than his own personality and, of course, he was "technically really brilliant" too. "When you listen to Heifetz, you hear Heifetz rather than the composer, I think. He was able to shape even the most boring piece into something wonderful with his own personality. But he played the great composers really well, too, I think."

Lunny's fascination with Oistrakh is buttressed by the fact that the teacher who has made the greatest impact on her playing was Oistrakh's last pupil, Rimma Sushanskaya. "She changed everything for me. She was really, really, great. I learned all the technique from her. And all the musicianship - through Oistrakh. That was really the turning point for me."

However, that's all in the past. At the moment, at 16, Cora is teacherless. She can't say why she chose to leave. It's not that she doesn't know why, just that it can't be spoken about. "There are so many reasons you leave a teacher, and a lot of them you can't really describe. Also, because, for me, for every person, each teacher is different. One teacher could be amazing for one person, but ruin another. Also, you spend time with a teacher and they've given you all they can give you, and then you need to go somewhere else. You just have to develop, that's really all it is."

SHE is reluctant to talk about the Eurovision Young Musician Competition in Vienna, where she didn't make it into the final. "The final in no way reflected the standard of the competition. There were several people who really ought to have been in the final but weren't, and there were other reasons why people were picked. But I can't really go into that, or it'll look like I'm complaining about not being in the final myself." Apart from that, she enjoyed the event ("lots of compulsory bus trips"), and being with so many other young musicians of like-minded commitment and determination. "It was great."

And the future? Is she on the lookout for another teacher? "Yes, I am. I'm going to go to master classes over the summer and `try out' people, as they say. I know already I'm going to go to Switzerland, to see Vladimir Spivakov." Spivakov is one of the musical mentors of the high-flying Russian pianist, Evgeny Kissin, and the two have made recordings together with Spivakov as conductor.

"He doesn't teach privately, actually. He doesn't have students regularly, but I'll probably learn something from him anyway. I don't know where else I'm going to go. I'll have to see."

Cora Venus Lunny plays Grieg, Falla and Rob Canning in Nicholas Collegiate Church on Friday 17th at 1.10 p.m.