The 2017 National Multicultural Festival will open with a concert that's a microcosm of musical multiculturalism.

The Miriam Lieberman Trio - led by an Australian singer-songwriter who plays the West African harp, the kora - will be guests in a concert that's headlined by The China National Opera and Dance Theatre Orchestra, led by conductor Hong Xia and principal gaohu soloist Bai Miao.

The orchestra will perform music merging traditional Chinese style with contemporary music. The performers use a combination of western and eastern instruments including the sheng, an ancient flute, the liuqin mandolin, and stringed instruments the gaohu and erhu. The orchestra has a history going back more than 50 years. This is its second visit to Australia. following a 2016 Chinese New Year 2016 concert.

Iranian band The Sarv Ensemble, established in 2001 and led by Canberra musician Salar Ayoubi, will also be performing.

Lieberman, a Sydneysider whose heritage is Eastern European and Jewish, will be singing, playing kora and guitar, and performing with the other members of her trio, violinist Lara Goodridge and cellist Kate Adams. They will also be accompanied by two guest artists, contemporary Ghanan dancer Lucky Lartey and another, yet to be confirmed West African performer.

"I'm very inspired by the dance movies; Lucky is a world-class dancer," Lieberman says.

The trio will also be performing in the free public concert at the festival on Friday that features headline performer Kate Ceberano along with Wiradjuri, Bollywood, Andrea Kirwin,The Borderers and Sol Nation. It starts at 4pm at Stage 1 in Garema Place.

The Miriam Lieberman Trio are coming to the festival as part of a national tour to promote their new album Full Circle.

"Three of the songs were written on the kora," Lieberman says. She says her songs sound a bit like Joni Mitchell with a bit of country-folk flavour and, not surprisingly, a West African influence.

"I wanted to write songs form the perspective of a woman," she says of her songwriting on this and her previous four albums.

"Some of the songs are autobiographical."

Their inspirations are varied - in Waiting for You it was Anzac Day and how "all people are waiting for bliss", in I Awake it was Lieberman's love of the ocean, and in Legacy it was a person in her family who is suffering from Lewy body disease.

It's not the first time Lieberman's performed in Canberra - she's headlined at the National Folk Festival, performing with this trio and formerly with puppet theatre troupe Company Gongoma. But Thurday's opening concert will mark her first time performing at Llewellyn Hall.

When she was 17 she went to Ecuador as an exchange student, an experience she says "changed my view of things". She had a good time. formed strong friendships and began developing an interest in other cultures.

She studied music and performed in a bar in Mexico and when she came back to Australia received an Australia Council grant to help record her first album, Naked Without My Cello (2008)

Lieberman has also spent long periods of time studying traditional music and dance in West Africa with musicians there, including kora player Toumani Diabate in Mali with the support of a grant from the John Butler Foundation.

"I worked with his extended family and stayed with him and his family for three months. It was an inspiring time recording with local musicians."

That period resulted in the album This is the Story (2010).

And Lieberman's story and music, full of strong African influences, continue.