It might have been tempting for two of this year’s busiest Canberra International Music Festival musicians to let their hair down in a cozy bar, before an intimate audience sipping cocktails.

Although relishing the relative freedom of jazz tempos and leaning into the ability to milk musical climaxes and opportunities for wild improvisation, David Griffiths and Timothy Young don’t give an inch in terms of precision and polish in this performance of jazz and ragtime numbers for clarinet and honky-tonk piano.

Timothy Young and David Griffiths: Prohibition Rags. Photo © Dalice Trost

A bogus barber’s shop façade at the Canberra’s QT Hotel conceals a buzzing prohibition-era speakeasy bar. The half-light allows you to see the shapes, but hides the faces, of an audience seated on stools at elevated bar tables as Griffiths and Young play from the far end of the room.

Instead of the fine Yamaha grand pianos Young’s hands have graced earlier in this festival week, this scarred upright – with a couple of broken strings and short a few keys at the top end – fits the bill both visually and aurally. It has the perfect measure of ‘bathroom timbre’, but is somehow in good tune.

In keeping with the spontaneous atmosphere, the audience gets everything advertised in the program, but a good deal more besides. Starting with The Entertainer as the introduction to a set of Scott Joplin Rags, the journey gets more interesting and more challenging as the evening progresses.

A special highlight is Griffiths playing Three Pieces by Igor Stravinsky. Unaccompanied, fiendishly difficult and detailed, and testing the clarinet’s full range along with trills, guttural flutters and glissandos, Griffiths’ breath control and athleticism are otherworldly.

There is no better modern composer for clarinet than Elena Kats-Chernin, and her Grand Rag is rendered with Bohemian passion and technical excellence.

David Griffiths: Prohibition Rags. Photo © Dalice Trost

A couple of unexpected treats follow in Jazz Marmalade by Larry Shields and Henry Ragas, and then Graveyard Blues by Clarence Woods and John Caldwell (with Young playing the banjo part on the piano).

Finally, John Novacek’s 2006 collection of Four Rags for Two Jons provides a quintessentially American summation of the ragtime genre, drawing on characteristics of Joplin, Gershwin, James Scott and Eubie Blake in different moods.

Griffiths and Young look equally at home on the floor of a speakeasy as on the classical concert stage, and it is the classical performers’ discipline and respect for the score (and the composer’s intent) that make this gig unusually arresting.

Of course, this isn’t accidental: CIMF’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti is clear that his ambition with this festival is to challenge, blend and cross genres, so his selection of anchoring artists who get this and dwell outside and in between traditional boundaries is the whole point.

But it still takes extraordinary musical understanding, technique, curiosity and courage to be able to function equally convincingly in both the jazz and classical worlds. Just when you think you’ve seen everything, Griffiths and Young take you to the next level – and do it with a sense of surreptitious fun and subversive mischief.