I no longer know if that is a quote or if I wrote it. It feels like it wrote me because it captured an essential truth that has asserted its will on my life. I am convinced that the worst form that suffering can take is a lack of love – a black hole in that place from where life should spring. In the contest between the resources which allow for happiness – sufficient income, enough time and abundant love – love always wins out. After all, who would knowingly choose a loveless life no matter how wealthy or how long.

What really counts in life, is that sense of being cared for in one's most tender moments. Being safe to open to another like a flower to the sun, so that which is interior, can be touched and fed, leaving us aglow with happiness.

I really love Canberra. One of the joys of an artist is to beautify the place you live. As a festival director I had this annual chance to shine the light on the city. And now with Voices in the Forest, I get to extend this gift to those who love singing.

If you watch The X Factor, or any of these TV showcases of young talent, you will know that sensation of suddenly crying because something quite astounding has occurred before your very eyes. That courageous act of creating beautiful sound, which in the moment of leaving their throat, reveals the singer completely. This wave form of feeling-infused sound physically touches us, passing through us completely, leaving behind a residual imprint of the singer's intent. There is a transfer that occurs. That thing they love to sing becomes the thing you love to hear, and in that shared space, there is the chance that something from your past can be forgiven, and pain forgotten. That is why we cry. Something in us rattles loose, floats up and releases.

Music, more than any other art form, moves us to do just that. That cathartic outpouring extrudes a tiny grain of salty pain from your system. It's good for you and the Voices in the Forest program will take advantage of this. You'll leave lighter, yet filled to the brim with love.

The trick to this, is to allow people to briefly experience true heartbreak and loss. The saddest moments in art, occur in film and in opera. Those impossibilities which are too cruel to be believed, which make you want to scream, like Rodolfo does at the end of La Boheme as Mimi dies unexpectedly in his arms.

La Boheme follows in the footsteps of Bizet's Carmen portraying the previously unconsidered lives of cigarette factory girls. Here we have Mimi, a starving seamstress, dying of TB in a garret. Puccini's masterpiece of Italian verismo, shows us the lives of bohemian artists, as they eke out a living, leaching off patrons and officials, in that tangled zone at the edge of prostitution.

Australians have always loved Boheme. It played in Melbourne's Her Majesty's Theatre five years after its world premiere in 1896. In the 1990s, Baz Luhrmann reinvented it for Opera Australia and helped invent a new genre. The filmed opera experience. Naturalistic. Believable. Real.

Baz's Boheme made Cheryl Barker a star. It launched her on the world stage and made her a career as Australia's greatest Puccini soprano. She told me she loved Boheme more than any other show, so I chose it for Voices. Diego Torre, the great Mexican tenor, likewise built his international career around the role of Rodolfo, and Jose Carbo, the Argentinian Australian baritone, now a principal artist with the Metropolitan Opera in NY, has enormous experience both recording and performing the role of the true friend Marcello. It is a dream cast for one of the world's greatest operas.

The secret of Boheme's powerful heartbreak is not just Mimi's death so soon after they are finally reunited. It is that final revealing that she really loves Rodolfo, just as he loves her, and now he will have to live on without her.

He has wasted the precious little time they had together by chasing her away, because of his fear he could not support her. With Mimi dead, his outburst of grief-struck heartbreak, no longer singing as much as sobbing, floods over us like a wave, breaking our hearts in the process. Whatever memory of ours rings in sympathy with his experience, allows us truly to empathise. A deep disturbance within us resolves, leaving us with a slowly fading ache. A cathartic release has occurred within us and we are less burdened for it.

After such grief, the third act for Voices is designed as balm. A romantic cocktail of strawberries and cream, to be washed down with champagne. Every fantastic tune under the sun. Diva anthems and "loop the loop" vocal trapeze acts combined with ensemble aerobatics. That final act is everything the soloists love to sing and you love to hear, best shared with someone you love.

You will know it all worked, when you drive home past the lake, a romantic twinkle in your eye, a tune in your heart, and a smile ear to ear.

Such is the magic of music's soft kisses.

Voices in the Forest is on at the National Arboretum on Saturday, November 21. Bookings: canberraticketing.com.au. See: voicesintheforest.com.au.