From left, Francesca Hiew, Matthew Laing, Jarrad Mathie and Kate Sullivan, who make up the Auric Quartet. HER violin tucked under her chin, Francesca Hiew makes a discreet but audible sniff that is the cue for the music to begin. She and the three other members of the Auric Quartet are rehearsing Mendelssohn's String Quartet No 2 in A minor. The introduction is an Adagio, with quietly consonant chords and a little melodic fragment that Mendelssohn borrowed from a song of his, Ist es wahr? Is it so?. Jarrad Mathie on the cello provides the resonant bass notes; Kate Sullivan on second violin and Matthew Laing on viola the singing middle voices. Then Laing's viola picks up a rapid rhythm, and Mendelssohn is ready to go places, but the players break it off. There are matters of intonation and phrasing to attend to, in these 18-and-a-bit bars of introduction. Laing pulls out his iPhone that has an app to check their tuning. Mathie fiddles around on his music stand for a pencil, and makes a note on the score. They play the introduction again, until pitch and balance are to everyone's satisfaction. The time is now 2.30pm, Mendelssohn's introduction has been given its allotted 15 minutes, and the Auric Quartet moves on to the next item on the agenda, Zemlinsky. A half-hour before, Hiew, Sullivan, Laing and Mathie were sitting in a cafe in South Melbourne, enjoying lunches of pork belly, deli sandwiches and pies. They are not only partners in a quartet; they are friends. Even so, they have been spending a lot of time in each other's company. Last week, Laing worked out that they had spent the past 58 days together. The players, all in their mid-20s, have been preoccupied with the Asia-Pacific Chamber Music Competition, starting in Melbourne today. The competition is for piano trios and quartets whose members must be under 35, and there are ensembles from Japan, China, Singapore and Australia. But the Auric Quartet -- the name, chosen for no particular reason, could refer to a French composer, a James Bond villain, or an adjective for gold -- has time against it. The musicians, all of them from the Australian National Academy of Music, have been playing together since only last year. They did some concerts, and recorded an audition DVD, before Mathie left for a year's study in the US. When he returned in May, the quartet went into solitary confinement of a sort, spending four weeks in rehearsal in Bermagui, on the NSW south coast, as guests of the Four Winds Festival. When they weren't swimming, or eating gifts of homemade cake or oysters, they were hard at work. It was not just a matter of learning the repertoire they would be playing in the competition: they had to learn how to rehearse, even those pieces they already knew. "The first week was concentrated on small details, nutting things out, really slow practice, trying to get perfectly in tune," Mathie says. And when that was over, we tried the same approach to music that was more fresh to us. We found it wasn't working because we needed to have the bigger concept in place. It sounds obvious, but you have to make the mistake to learn it. During the past month that the quartet has been back in Melbourne, I have spent several occasions with them -- sharing lunch at local cafes and watching them rehearse in ANAM's studios. At lunch, the men were usually the most talkative. They aren't big-mouths, but they express themselves easily and without reticence. The women, who share the role of first and second violin, were quieter and less expansive. In the rehearsal room, a different dynamic takes over. The musicians are equal partners in this enterprise: everyone has their say, everyone listens. And when they pick up their instruments, the collective concentration can be felt in the room, even when the music is most extravagantly expressive, and the interplay between the four is most animated. This may be what is meant by ensemble: the quality of music-making when many become one. In his book An Equal Music, Vikram Seth describes that palpable sense of togetherness with his fictional group, the Maggiore Quartet: "A strange composite being we are, not ourselves any more but the Maggiore, composed of so many disjunct parts: chairs, stands, music, bows, instruments, musicians -- sitting, standing, shifting, sounding -- all to produce these complex vibrations that jog the inner ear, and through them the grey mass that says: joy; love; sorrow; beauty." On another day, a different energy blows into the rehearsal room, like a gust of wind. Violinist William Hennessy, a teacher at ANAM, has been coaching the Auric Quartet for the competition. The musicians have also been playing with Hennessy's Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, forming half of the players on a recent tour for Mendelssohn's Octet. Hiew is in the leader's chair, and the group is again rehearsing the A-minor quartet, this time the Presto final movement. It begins with dramatic tremolo strings -- like a presentiment in an opera -- and a rhapsodic violin melody. Hennessy wants the Aurics to play large, to break out of their rehearsed version of musical events. He flings his arms around, grabs his violin and almost knocks over his music stand. ("It's not so much the dynamic as the gesture," he says.) To Mathie, he suggests playing a note arco, with the bow, rather than pizzicato as written, if he thinks it sounds better that way. ("Seriously?" Mathie asks, incredulous.) He encourages Hiew to play with a wider vibrato, warm and luscious, like Joan Sutherland. "None of you is ever going to play with too wide a vibrato," he says. In a private conversation, Hennessy is full of admiration for these four young musicians who play as a "total quartet." It doesn't matter that they have been playing together for only a short time: a new quartet, if it's ever going to sound good, will sound good in its first year. "They are four really balanced people," Hennessy says. It's more than being able to get on well with each other. The quartet has a culture of profound respect, and clear trust in each other, and they are there absolutely for music. There are no prima donnas, just a sheer delight in playing together . . . It may sound weird, but it's very unusual. Sullivan says she and her fellow musicians intend to approach the chamber music competition as if it were a concert, rather than a contest of ensembles: it will be less daunting that way. This evening they will play Haydn and Britten; on Thursday afternoon, the Mendelssohn and a quartet by Thomas Ades called Arcadiana. If they make it through to the final round on Sunday, they will perform Zemlinsky's second string quartet, one of the pieces they first played together. "We'll bow and scrape and see what happens," says Mathie of this week's prospects. But the quartet has plans beyond the Melbourne competition. They have been invited to take part in a masterclass at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany next month, and to compete in the Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition in Norway in September. Hiew says she and the other three plan to stick together. "That's the aim; that's what we wanted to do," she says. We got together to be a quartet. The Asia-Pacific Chamber Music Competition is at the Iwaki Auditorium and Melbourne Recital Centre until Sunday.