The Australia Piano Quartet has been Ensemble in Residence at the University of Technology Sydney since 2012. The group tours nationally and internationally on a regular basis, and, in addition to performing cornerstones of Piano Quartet repertoire, are vigorous commissioners of new works. They are also committed to bringing lost and/or neglected works to the attention of their audiences, and one the most noteworthy and unusual instances of this is the Piano Quartet in A minor by Gustav Mahler.

Mahler’s one (yes, one) surviving chamber work is shrouded in mystery, and rightly termed an ‘Epic Fragment’. It dates from his days as a student, and according to Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell, was likely the work for which he won a composition prize at the Vienna Music Academy in 1876, when he was sixteen. It is not clear from archival references whether two performances in 1876 (with Mahler, an exceptional pianist, performing the piano part) refer to this one movement or to an entire three or four-movement work, but available evidence suggests that a full work was not completed. Mahler met his close friend Nathalie Bauer-Lechner around this time, and in her memoirs she recalled discussions of ‘a sonata for violin...