CLASSICAL music doesn’t just allow you lose yourself in the moment, it can also take you back in time, make you think and paint the most vivid of pictures.

Deep Reflections at Lighthouse, Poole provided the opportunity to do all these things.

It was mainly the chance to celebrate the music of what we know as the Czech Republic, but at the time of Janacek and Dvorak, was one part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918).

Janacek’s Lachian Dances provided an absolutely joyous and colourful opening 19 minutes, six pieces inspired by the folk heritage of his homeland Moravia, rousing and so evocative of Central Europe.

Next was Mozart’s Piano Concerto with Ryan Wigglesworth conducting from the piano in the most accomplished and disciplined of performances.

Mr Wigglesworth is also one of our leading composers, a man of immense talent who received and appreciated one of the warmest of welcomes from the audience.

Mozart of course had his own special connections with Imperial Vienna.

Then after the interval it was back a little further north for Dvorak’s 7th Symphony, not his most popular but surely his finest, sweeping, absorbing, dramatic and majestic.

It was this work, commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society, that made Dvorak internationally renowned as a symphonic composer.

On his daily walk to Prague railway station, he said "the first subject of my new symphony flashed in to my mind on the arrival of the festive train bringing our countrymen from Pest".

He felt that the symphony should be "capable of shaking the world." It did.

All empires are fascinating for how they rise, hold together and inevitably fall.

And for the diversity of their culture, not least when that empire straddles a vast area.

The musical diversity and heritage of Austria Hungary is priceless and like empire itself, endlessly fascinating.