The importance of cross-cultural connection for a better future: this is the principle that has finally brought virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma to Australian shores.

Over the past year, the maestro who has recorded nearly 100 albums and been awarded 18 Grammys has been performing the same six pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach over and over again.

The project was inspired by Ma’s early experiences of Bach’s music – they were some of the first pieces he learned when he began playing cello at the age of four – and Bach’s “ability to speak to our shared humanity at a time when our civic conversation is so often focused on division”.

The tour, titled the Bach Project, is intended as an exercise in cultural healing. Crossing 36 countries over two years, each performance is followed by a “day of action” tailored to the local community, including seminars, talks, workshops and more.

This is not the first time Ma has used music as an activist tool. In 1998, he embarked upon the Silk Road Project, named for the ancient trade routes across Asia and Europe. Called “a bold act of cultural reconciliation”, the project also spawned a not-for-profit organisation devoted to cross-cultural artistic connection, a feature film – Morgan Neville’s The Music of Strangers – and a perpetually touring and often-changing international performance collective, the Silk Road Ensemble.

On Monday night, as part of the Bach Project, Ma will perform Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello at the Sydney Opera House, before heading to Melbourne’s Arts Centre later in the week.

Tickets for both performance are sold out, but for those who missed out and those elsewhere in Australia, the performance at the Sydney Opera House on Monday night will be livestreamed by the ABC and simulcast on ABC Classic FM and via other ABC digital streaming platforms.

The live stream begins at 6.45pm AEDT and will end at approximately 9.30pm. It will be available to watch – or to repeat watch – only until midnight AEDT.

For those in Sydney, there will be a second opportunity to hear Ma play in the flesh. At 10am on Tuesday at Barangaroo Reserve, the site of first contact between the Gadigal people and the European colonists, three Indigenous poets will meet to talk about the intersection of art and activism. Ma will provide “musical contributions” to the panel discussion, alongside dancer and violinist Eric Avery. The event is free and open to the public.

In Melbourne, Ma will take part in the Coming Back Out Salon to celebrate LGBT elders. The event, being held on Saturday 9 November at the Mural Hall on Bourke Street, is free but bookings are essential. The salon will acknowledge the resilience of the community but also address the growing research around isolation and loneliness plaguing elderly populations, which is deemed even more acute for LGBT people.

After the Melbourne dates, The Bach Project will head to New Zealand, followed by Indonesia later this month.