Music hand-in-hand with science; creatively synthesising music with engineering.

With each concert the Australia Piano Quartet (APQ) demonstrates why it is one of the country’s most dynamic and adventurous chamber groups. It is often said that music and the sciences, particularly maths, go hand in hand; on this evening, the UTS resident ensemble invited us into their pad for a concert entitled Mendelssohn Meets Mechatronics. The concert took place in the Engineering and IT building, and it was clear that this was to be no ordinary concert when it required some feat of imaginative ingenuity to work out how to get from Level 0 to Level 1 where the concert took place. The APQ was stationed amid an entanglement of gadgets, screens, robots and wires, while the architecture of the building itself provided a unique backdrop to the evening’s performance, with its angular staircases, walkways and floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

The first item on the programme was a truncated arrangement of Mozart’s Wind Quintet K452 for piano quartet. The ensemble performed just the Largo – Allegro Moderato first movement – an elegant and restrained palate cleanser. Mozart of course is capable of the most dramatic musical moments, but his precocity...