The Australia Ensemble UNSW begins its 2026 season with a curatorial masterclass that traces the lineage of musical reinvention.

One of its framing devices is Ragtime, which reshaped European music by adopting African American syncopated rhythms in the 19th century. It appears at the opening of the concert and returns again before the denouement of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale – the Faustian story of a soldier on leave who encounters the Devil and trades his violin for a book that foretells the movements of the stock market.

Australia Ensemble UNSW’s Dimity Hall and Julian Smiles. Photo © Maria Boyadgis

Elena Kats-Chernin’s The Grand Rag opens the concert, with Guest Artist Andrea Lam at the piano and David Griffiths on clarinet. This leads into Nino Rota’s Clarinet Trio, for which Lam and Griffiths are joined by cellist Julian Smiles. Rota himself acknowledged that his music honoured tradition with wit and optimism, and the trio honours this in a conversation with the past that is playful and edgy.

Violinist Dimity Hall then joins Lam and Smiles for Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 1. The composer’s teacher, Maximilian Steinberg, famously criticised his “grotesquerie” in emulating...