Festival titan and past artistic director Stephen McIntyre, renowned in Australia and around the world as one of this country’s most cherished musicians, transports us with a recital of entrancing music by Maurice Ravel, masterfully unveiling a portal to parallel universes of the surreal. The stage is set with a tender evocation of a little princess from a bygone Spanish court, before Ravel holds up his magic Miroirs and behold, a resplendent array of sights and sounds – a valley of sonorous bells, a lone ship on the rippling waves of the ocean, glistening invocations of sorrowful birds and flickering moths, and a Spanish court jester exuberantly performing his Alborada or morning song – and concluding with swirling mists and vapours, gradually and tantalizingly revealing an immense ballroom filled with dancers in the frenzied throes of La Valse.