This might strike a chord — especially since it sounds like the plot of a feel-good movie.

A 21-year-old university student was thrust into the spotlight after an emergency occurred halfway through a musical performance in Sydney on Saturday night.

Sterling Nasa, a politics and international studies student at the University of Sydney, was attending “La La Land in Concert” — a touring production of the film in which a professional orchestra plays along to the movie — when the show’s intermission got suspiciously long, The Guardian reports.

After 40 minutes, Justin Hurwitz, the Oscar-winning composer of “La La Land,” walked out onstage with a pretty wild request.

It turned out that the concert’s keyboardist had gotten sick, and for the concert to continue, Hurwitz needed someone who could read sheet music and play the piano. He was hoping that someone else in the orchestra could handle the task — or could enlist one of their musician friends — but no one was available.

“So I just thought, well, we have 2,500 people in here,” Hurwitz told The Guardian. Desperate, he decided to shoot his shot.

“Is there someone in the audience who is an amazing sight-reader?” Hurwitz can be seen asking in a video shot by an audience member.

A friend of Nasa’s volunteered him, and after Hurwitz asked Nasa “a couple of follow-up questions,” the composer decided to take a gamble on the 21-year-old.

“It wasn’t a set-up at all. I was panicking, to be honest,” Hurwitz told 7NEWS Australia.

“OK, can you join us?” Hurwitz can be seen sheepishly asking Nasa in footage of the incident, which captured the shocked expressions of the people sitting nearby.

Nasa, who also plays the organ and has worked as a bagpipes tutor, suddenly found himself having to play the score of a conductor he respected in front of that conductor — and thousands of other people — with no chance to rehearse.

Being a fan of “La La Land,” Nasa was also well aware that he was up for quite a challenge. The second act included the John Legend piece “Start a Fire,” which features a complex synthesizer solo written to match the erratic hand movements of Ryan Gosling’s character in the film.

“The synth solo is really technical, and I thought, even a really high-level professional sight-reader would probably not be able to do it,” Hurwitz told The Guardian. “As it was coming up, I was thinking, ‘Oh no, how’s he going to be able to handle the solo?’”

In the moment, Nasa decided to take a leap of faith, and instead of trying to play the tricky solo, opted to do his own thing.

“He saw it coming up … and he just improvised,” Hurwitz said.

The composer added, “That is a whole other skill on top of sight-reading. To be able to play a really cool solo in the right key, in the right scale, on the fly with no rehearsal — it was remarkable.”

The audience was impressed as well, and for his efforts, Nasa received a standing ovation from the crowd.

“It’s always nice to get some applause, get some response,” he told 7NEWS of being plucked from the audience. “But I think also, just a little bit of terror.”

Nasa, who appeared pretty humble about the whole whirlwind experience, called it a “blessing.”

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