Sydney Symphony Orchestra has returned to the Sydney Opera House, albeit for a scaled down Cocktail Hour concert in the intimate surrounds of the 200-seater Utzon Room when 10 musicians performed a heavily Romantic mixture of Grieg and Tchaikovsky.

Associate Concertmaster Sun Yi. Photograph courtesy of  Sydney Symphony Orchestra

For the players it must have been a nostalgic trip back home having been locked out of the Concert Hall since 2019 while it undergoes its $200 million refurbishment. For the audience it was a chance to watch the musicians from a few metres away, seeing them work and hearing them breathe, rather than looking through the wrong end of a telescope in a vast auditorium.

The two works on the program, Grieg’s String Quartet No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence – more often heard with a full orchestra – made for a heady mixture accompanied by a complimentary glass of wine.

The anguished opening chords of the Grieg work bear out the composer’s words to a friend that this quartet “is not intended to bring trivialities to the market”, and the four SSO players, led by Claire Herrick, brought a resonant but nicely nuanced...