Art is not separate from life, it's absolutely central to it. Music, in particular, has a universality that enables us to connect with ourselves and with others; it enables us to experience something more metaphysical, it lifts us from the everyday.

It's a language that transcends speech, that confronts and challenges us, that soothes, that opens and recharges our minds.

In my opinion, classical music is the most transformative of all art forms. Without us even noticing, it can reach into the very core of our beings.

Classical music certainly continues as a central force in my life. My mother was a fine amateur pianist: one of my earliest memories is sitting on her lap while she played Chopin.

As a child who found the expression of emotion particularly difficult, music was a real force of good.

At the age of three I started piano lessons; I am grateful I was brought up in a family where a love of reading, listening and a thirst for understanding and knowledge of the world was de rigueur. My father, an Australian military attaché, had a large LP collection; as a youngster I became completely obsessed with Ferde Grofé's evocative Grand Canyon Suite.

Growing up in various countries across the world, I had something of an unconventional upbringing, but my family always returned to Canberra between postings.

My commitment to the city's music scene is very personal: my most formative musical experiences took place at the Canberra School of Music in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as an organ and musicology undergraduate. The lecturers were first-rate. Bill Hawkey, Olle Palmqvist, Larry Sitsky, Robyn Holmes, Max McBride, Rick McIntyre, to name just a few.

I never would have guessed at the time, but this education would put me in excellent stead when working as a conductor some years later.

From the CSM, I continued my studies in Paris. There, and in London, I enjoyed a fantastic career for a number of years, until I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome in 2005.

I kept playing for as long as possible, until my left hand just stopped working during an important recital at Oxford. Luckily for me (and the audience!) I can improvise. I was able to roughly make my way through to the end of the piece, albeit with some extra funky harmonies.

I can laugh about it now, but it was a very dark time for me.

The following year, I successfully auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London and spent three incredibly inspiring years under the guidance of Sir Colin Davis.

These years made me. On the podium, I'd once again found my musical voice.

Perhaps surprisingly, the act of conducting is conceptually very similar to playing the organ. I'm a synaesthete - I experience sound as colour - and the evocative timbral scope of an organ is rather like being right in the middle of your own enormous orchestra.

A collection of notes together, certain harmonies, will elicit a colour or combination of colours for me. If a chord is played in the woodwinds and the brass, and one note is out of tune, the whole effect feels out of focus, fuzzy, as though peering at a painting in low light.

It's very easy to hear a 10-pitch chord and know exactly where the imbalance is, simply because the colour's not right.

From there, my early professional years were spent as assistant conductor, first at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and then to conducting legend Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Since then, my career has taken me all around the world: from the London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, to regular invitations to the BBC Proms and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to recording for Decca Classics and the BBC.

It's also been a delight to return to Canberra and work with the musicians of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra as guest conductor over the past two years. I hold very fond memories of performing Nigel Westlake's oboe concerto, Spirit of the Wild, with the blazingly brilliant Diana Doherty, and helming the CSO's Opera Gala, in honour of the late Richard Gill, last year.

While Canberra has always had a distinct cultural identity, I'm thrilled to see how the creative and performing arts have grown and flourished since my student days.

As I step into the role of artistic adviser from 2021, I look forward to building on the hugely impressive legacy of Dr Nicholas Milton, who has established the CSO as both a national leader in Australian music and a pillar of the local community.

Addressing a parliamentary committee in the late 1940s, Sir Bernard Heinze spoke of the necessity for a genuine Australian sound, saying that "no country is deemed musical or even cultured, which lives on the music of other people, and all that is permanent in the arts of music, lives in its composition".

My vision is to see the CSO develop even further as an orchestral innovator, telling compelling Australian stories and taking on thought-provoking subject matter through music.

A collaborative and pioneering spirit of music-making and thrillingly high standards are key. As Genevieve Lacey writes in her essay Learning to Listen: "There is space here for many stories, many tellers, and many listeners. Music is something to be shared."

The experience of making music together can be incredibly profound. In this time of real global difficulty, it seems to me music matters even more than ever.

Recently, Professor Matthew Hindson (the CSO's Australian Series curator) and I co-curated a new commissioning Australian Miniseries, which will see 14 Australian composers produce new works for solo instrument, to be premiered online by CSO musicians.

This project involves a number of composers with Canberra links: Christopher Sainsbury, Kate Moore, Michael Sollis and Vincent Plus, as well as other established and emerging Australian voices, including Deborah Cheetham, Ross Edwards, Liza Lim, Melody Etvs and Ella Macens.

I see my position as an invitation to re-imagine; this miniseries reflects our commitment to invest in the new, in Australian composers, all while interacting with the immediate reality of the times we live in.

Our 2021 season is inspired by musical journeys, from extraordinary masterworks to the magnificent pluralism of Australian music today.

I've looked to explore a multitude of subject matters: the socio-political satire of Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins (composed in 1933 yet still pertinent today), the disastrous longing and desire of Romeo and Juliet, the celestial visions of Mozart and Mahler, and the transformative magic of Stravinsky's Firebird.

In contrast to Weill, Mahler - in his fourth symphony - stayed well away from politics, instead composing an utterly enchanting work that resonates with themes of childhood, innocence and spirituality.

Built around the song Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life), which presents a child's version of heaven, Mahler likened the melodies of the first movement to "a dewdrop on a flower that, suddenly illuminated by the sun, bursts into a thousand lights and colours".

Our Australian contemporary works will further extend these themes. Benjamin de Murashkin's radiant LOGOS depicts the formation of the universe, opening with breathy orchestral timbres which gradually gather into a huge impulses of sound and harmony, before contracting back to an almost complete stillness.

Kim Cunio will explore the impact of climate change in a commission for chamber orchestra. I've also programmed recent works by Holly Harrison, film composer Leah Curtis, Elena Kats-Chernin and Nigel Westlake - both Canberra favourites - and Richard Meale's Viridian, a lush and iridescent yet infrequently performed work.

I'm delighted to be joined by newly appointed principal guest conductor Simon Hewett, world-class Australian soloists Lorina Gore and Jayson Gilham, and rising stars violinist Courtenay Cleary and pianist Sine Winther.

Canberra is a dynamic and vibrant capital, and the creative energy is palpable. The CSO is an integral part of this landscape: an orchestra of gifted, energetic, passionate musicians, with a real hunger to discover new sounds, stories and ideas. I'm so looking forward to sharing our 2021 season with our Canberra audiences.

Having lived and worked in Europe since the early 2000s, it feels very special for me to be able to "come home" in this way.

A postscript:

While writing this essay, some lines of John Berger came to mind. He wrote: "that we find a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe".

It's the same with music. I hope for a world where we all can find nourishment and enrichment through art, through something that is greater than our ourselves.

Whether you're a longtime CSO subscriber or a first-time audience member, we extend you a very warm welcome and look forward to going on this journey with you.