Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Principal Cellist Jonathan Békés and Festival Co-Director Stefan Cassomenos unite to transport us to an alternate temporal continuum with three composers’ expressions of hypnotic soundscapes. Inspired by a text from the Book of Revelation – “that there shall be time no longer” – Messiaen’s transcendent Quartet for the End of Time was composed while he was interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp. In this fifth movement, the tempo marking is “infinitely slow, ecstatic”, and in its “Praise for the Eternity of Jesus” invokes a suspension of time as we experience it – in the presence of The Divine. Fêted Australian composer Maria Grenfell takes her inspiration from surrealist artist René Magritte’s “Time Transfixed” – a painting of a steam train emerging from a domestic fireplace, at once thermodynamic and frozen in the stasis of the artwork. Poulenc’s gorgeous and rarely performed Sonata provides a nostalgic snapshot of a bygone Parisian era, with the characteristic fragrances of dance halls, cafés and salons. The sublime Cavatina provides an unearthly moment of reflective stillness, before thrusting us back to the carefree antics of the “real” world.