Manhattan ? Ye Yoo is, in a sense, two different people.

The first person is a slightly nervous teen who likes going to the movies and taking pictures and is settling into U.S. life after leaving South Korea four years ago.

But put a cello in Yoo’s hand and the second person emerges, who sits straighter and speaks clearer. Once she puts bow to string there is the subtle impression that, at least for her, the world and everything in it has faded into the background.

Yoo, a sophomore at Manhattan High School, has been playing since 7. But on Saturday she crossed another musical milestone when she played for the first time with a professional orchestra.

After a series of tryouts, Yoo was selected by the Topeka Symphony as the state’s youth talent. Her reward: not only would she join the symphony on the stage, she would play a solo performance of Dmitri Shostakovitch’s cello concerto.

Yoo said she has been rehearsing the piece for about a year, and has also begun to learn about Shostakovitch’s life to better represent the themes and emotion in his music.

He lived in the Soviet Union, she said, “and he couldn’t write the music he wanted to write. So he was angry, and kind of bitter.”

Trying to describe the piece and the composer’s emotion is in the realm of Yoo’s first person, and there is a nervous, fidgeting energy.

But then she picks up her cello to play, there is no nervousness or fidgeting. The concerto is aggressive, occasionally dissonant and is considered by some to be one of the most difficult performance pieces.

Yoo, who now is training with Ed Laut of Kansas University, already is looking beyond Saturday’s performance. She intends to audition for the Kansas City Symphony. She also is preparing to audition for the Curtis Institute of Music, a worldrenowned music conservatory that takes only about 160 students a year.

She said, most of all, she wanted to thank her parents for supporting her and prodding her along when she first began and, strangely enough, didn’t like the cello at all.