Anyone who's taken any kind of long-haul flight to or from Australia knows how crippling jet lag can be.
But Jessica Cottis, the Canberra Symphony Orchestra's chief conductor, was taking it in her stride on Friday, as she bounced into the office less than a day after stepping off a flight from London.
It had been more than a year since her last stint here - not ideal when you're the artistic director of a company - and she said she wanted nothing more than to get back in front of the orchestra she's come to know so well.
The Canberra orchestra will this week be performing the final in its Llewellyn series, with works by Stravinsky, Sibelius and Canberra-born composer Leah Curtis, performing a piece commissioned especially for the program.
Cottis has synaesthesia, meaning she experiences sound through colour and vice versa. Stravinsky's Petrucshka, for example, "is always a bright yellow canvas. It's all yellows all pinging off each other, like a James Turrell exhibition," she said.
It's all in sync with her lifestyle of jolting landscape changes; she most recently spent two months in Copenhagen with the Royal Danish Orchestra.
There, it was winter, and she was working with one of the world's oldest orchestras, dating back to 1448.
Here, it was a blustery, erratic El Nina spring, and her orchestra is one of the newer ones, established in 1950.
"It's crazy - the variety is amazing. I wouldn't have it any other way," she said.
"I mean, two months in Copenhagen was nice, because travelling can be tiring, as everyone knows. But the mix of it's really great, and at the heart of it, of course, is the music."
She said living most of her life overseas wasn't ideal; although she has strong connections to Canberra, having spent some her schooling years here when her father was in the military, she had become accustomed to midnight zoom meetings, and coming up with programs while working in a different hemisphere.
"It's really important to sort of understand what the role is. One is chief conductor, and that means I have to be here, making music, inspiring musicians, in person," she said.
"But the other part of the job is artistic director, and that literally could be done anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. And that's from programming, a year or more ahead. That's developing where we're going as an organisation, not just the organisation itself, but how we fit and how we interact with our Canberra audiences and what we're doing to develop that. So all of those aspects, all that organisational stuff and, you know, funding and just how we exist as an ecosystem in Canberra - that can be done.
"Regularly, my entire household are in bed, and we've all had dinner, everyone's finished, and I'm up having a zoom meeting in the middle of the night. Is there a internet connection in the North Pole? Probably. So I could do those meetings from there."
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- Get into Taki (or any of these other fun food things) this week
- Opera's 'kick in the guts' from ACT government
- The Canberra playgroup so good, mum drives an hour from NSW
- From Lord of the Rings to Belco Arts: Sara's back on a home stage
But she maintained there was nothing like actually being here. She was forced to miss her last scheduled concert due to COVID, and said Canberra and its landscape had changed every time she returned.
"I feel like everything that's happening is an opportunity to change the way we see the world," she said.
"That's how it has to be."
- Jessica Cottis will be conducting the Canberra Symphony Orchestra's Infinite Possibilities at Llewellyn Hall on Wednesday November 23 and Thursday November 24. cso.org.au.
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