VIRTUOSO on one of the world’s weirdest musical instruments, livewire conversationalist and self-confessed “good girl”, Nadia Ratsimandresy is coming to town from France for a world premiere at the Canberra International Music Festival.

She’ll be performing on the ondes Martenot, an instrument quite possibly never before heard in Canberra, and she can be expected to make waves as she plays in the world premiere of a work by Tasmanian composer Konstantin Koukias.

The ondes Martenot (literally “Martenot waves”), is an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by Frenchman Maurice Martenot. Its unnervingly weird sounds, the “Oooooos” you can hear in movies such as “Mad Max”, “Ghostbusters” and “Lawrence of Arabia” are produced by oscillation in vacuum tubes and yet it looks something like a piano.

That is how nine-year old Ratsimandresy became an “ondiste”. Born in Paris to Madagascan immigrant parents, she was determined to be the perfect Parisian girl.

“When I was young I was very obedient,” she tells “CityNews” by phone from Paris.

“When your parents want you to take piano lessons, you do it.”

But there was a very long waiting list. Luckily the school in suburban Paris was run by Françoise Pellié Murail who, spotting her disappointment, said: “Just come to my class, there is a keyboard and we do some other sounds.”

She was hooked, but not in a tragic way.

“Okay, I was just nine and you just follow what your parents and the teacher say,” she says.

“I discovered the different sounds… it looked like a keyboard, but it’s not a piano, the sound is completely different.”

Little did she realise that she was studying with the partner of top exponent of the ondes Martenot, Tristan Murail, himself disciple of composer Olivier Messiaen, who made the instrument famous.

“But for me at age nine it wasn’t a big deal,” she says.

“I don’t remember thinking it was weird, I needed to connect with it in a very simple way.

“I was a very little girl, so I just practised… it was fun, it was interesting.”

Growing up, she attended the Paris Conservatoire and met a lot of composers who wrote “pedagogical pieces” for students to play.

“I had my hands full playing works that were composed by people who were still alive – just imagine, as if Mozart brings his music and says: ‘Just try it’.”

Since graduating, Ratsimandresy has co-founded the 3D Trio, composed for the performance company Mabel Octobre, developed a solo program of electronic wave music and worked with a group that navigates between rock and contemporary music since 2012. She is now professor of Ondes & Synthesisers at the Regional Conservatoire of Boulogne-Billancourt in west Paris.

Engaging a famous “ondiste” is not a gamble for festival director Roland Peelman. On the contrary, it fits perfectly with the emerging theme of music and migration.

“There is a grand thread,” he says, “of how cultures from different places travelled across the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic and as far as Australia”.

An immigrant himself, Peelman is interested in the countries of immigration and “the palate that this brings to the musical scene”. A fine example is Egyptian-born oud player Joseph Tawadros, trained in Cairo but here playing all kinds of music including jazz.

The complexities of migration will also be to the fore when Ratsimandresy plays in Greek-Australian composer Kon Koukias’ new work “Epirus, An Ancient Voice” as part of a predominantly French program, “Invention Française”. Elsewhere the focus will be transatlantic, with Iberian and South American music.

“I didn’t set out to create a grand theme, but that has been the upshot,” he says.

But theme or no theme, the focus for patrons at the 2016 festival will be on luminous musicians, just like Ratsimandresy, who promisingly says: “I’m not a good girl anymore”.

Canberra International Music Festival, April 28-May 8. Nadia Ratsimandresy will appear in the concert “Invention Française,” at the Fitters’ Workshop Kingston on May 4 and in “Meet the Artists”, Ainslie Arts Centre, Braddon, May 5. Bookings and program details at cimf.org.au