When Jessica Cottis stands on the podium and raises her baton before the Canberra Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday, she will be coming home.
She's made an international reputation, conducting some of the world's big-name orchestras, from the London Symphony to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But she started in Canberra, with her enthusiasm fired up at the School of Music and at the organ of St Andrew's Cathedral in Forrest.
Her father was posted to embassies abroad as the military attache - but Canberra was home.
"Growing up in various countries across the world, I had something of an unconventional upbringing, but my family always returned to Canberra between postings," she said.
Wherever she was, music was her surround sound, either from her father's records or from instruments.
"My mother was a fine amateur pianist. One of my earliest memories is sitting on her lap while she played Chopin. At the age of three I started piano lessons," she said.
The Canberra School of Music was the logical step. There, a host of inspirational teachers, well, inspired her.
One of them - Bill Hawkey - suggested she try the organ at St Andrews and she was hooked.
"He said to me, 'Look, you're awfully good. Have you ever considered playing the organ'?" Ms Cottis said.
"I said, 'No', and he said, 'Why don't you come for a couple of trial lessons'? And that was it."
She continued her studies in Paris and London but her career as a performer was then derailed in 2005 by carpal tunnel syndrome, the condition where a nerve in the forearm is damaged and pain prevents the hand moving freely. It spelled the end of a career as a keyboard performer. In the middle of a performance in Oxford, her left hand just stopped working and that was it.
But as one door closed another opened: conducting.
She's based in London and before COVID-19 led that peripatetic life of a top-flight musician who goes where the gig is.
She conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the prestigious BBC Proms festival in the Albert Hall in London in 2016.
She's carried her two batons to Denmark, Singapore, Houston, Milan, Cardiff and Ottawa. Two batons in case one breaks, by the way.
Her have-baton-will-travel approach from her pre-COVID schedule gives a flavour: March 4, 2020: the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in Copenhagen; two days later, March 6, the LSO in London. In the space of two weeks in 2018, she conducted in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and California.
And now, the return to where it all began. She was appointed a year ago as the Canberra Symphony's artistic adviser but that title has now morphed into its chief conductor and artistic director.
COVID kept her away until now so Wednesday's concert is the first time on the podium in a concert in her new role.
"It's great to be back, given that my seminal influences as a musician were here in Canberra," she told The Canberra Times.
Wednesday's and Thursday's concerts at Llewellyn Hall will be of 20th century music. Beyond that, as the collaboration with the orchestra developed, Ms Cottis said she would conduct the great European "classical canon" - like Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart - but she would broaden the repertoire with an emphasis on modern Australian music, including new commissions.
"I see our work, and my work, as being living custodians of classical music, that we bring forward this genius and also keep it living," she said.
Music lives for her in colour. She is a synaesthete who experiences sound as colour.
Synaethesia means she associates different sounds with different colours so she carries coloured pencils to mark up the scores in different colours - the wind section in blue, the brass in green and the strings in red.
"In my scores, I use light blue, light green and a strong red. Harp is red, too!" she said.
"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."
So the coloured pencils won't be far away when she rises to start a new era with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.
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