The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Cocktail Hour is a delightful, relaxed social experience that transforms an early-evening hour into an intimate chamber music soirée. Set in the beautiful Utzon Room of the Sydney Opera House, each event presents a carefully curated one-hour program with no interval, chosen by SSO musicians themselves, paired with a complimentary glass of Handpicked wine included in the ticket price.
The Utzon Room’s distinctive folded concrete beams and blue gum timber floor combine to diffuse sound evenly, delivering exceptional clarity and warmth ideal for chamber music. In this compact space, where the audience sits almost within arm’s reach of the musicians, fifteen players generated rich power and warmth without sacrificing transparency or intimacy.
As a dedicated horn player with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Euan Harvey’s deep love of Romantic music shone through in his thoughtful curation — particularly his passion for the late works of Richard Strauss (whose father was a renowned horn player). It was especially telling that he chose the string sextet prologue to Strauss’s final opera Capriccio, even though it contains no horn part at all. His inclusion of Britten’s Sinfonietta, Op. 1, the teenage composer’s graduation piece from the Royal Academy of Music, also highlighted his connection working with the young musicians in the SSO Fellows. 
The Siegfried Idyll made for a magical opening. In the close confines of the Utzon Room, it was easy to imagine its original 1870 performance, when Wagner surprised his wife Cosima on her birthday by gathering a small ensemble on the staircase of their Swiss villa, gently waking her with this tender recital on Christmas morning. The piece unfolded like a slow sunrise, beginning with the warm, deep tones of Timothy Nankervis and Elizabeth Neville’s cellos, supported by Jaan Pallandi’s steady double bass. Emma Sholl’s shining flute and the graceful woodwind interplay of Shefali Prior (oboe), Alexander Morris and Clare Fox (clarinets) floated beautifully above this foundation. As the music developed, all sections combined warmly — Todd Gibson-Cornish’s lyrical bassoon blending with the rich horns of Euan Harvey and Samuel Jacobs, topped by David Elton’s bright trumpet. The woodwinds engaged in charming conversational exchanges, with the horns’ short punctuating notes echoed by the violins and a lovely horn line later passed to Emma Sholl’s flute. In a few moments near the close, the strings’ rich sound occasionally overshadowed the delicate woodwind detail — a very understandable balancing challenge in this compact acoustic.
Strauss’s Capriccio Sextet, the instrumental prologue to his final opera about the eternal conversation between words and music, followed. Scored for strings only — two violins, two violas, and two cellos — the work unfolds as a single, continuous Andante con moto movement that feels almost like an extended adagio. Built around one graceful, long-breathed main theme that returns in different guises, it reveals Strauss’s late-style maturity and coherence. Of all three pieces, the Capriccio Sextet’s quietly moving, almost hypnotic beauty stayed with me the longest.
Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonietta Op. 1 was an astonishingly ambitious and confident Op. 1 for a nineteen-year-old. Titled Sinfonietta (Italian for “little symphony”), it is a compact three-movement work lasting about 15–17 minutes is written for ten players. The three movements flow almost without pause, giving the musicians barely enough time to draw breath as the piece moves from the restless first movement through the lyrical central variations into the energy of the final Tarantella.
With its modernist edge influenced by Stravinsky, the Sinfonietta often felt energetic and abrasive, full of constantly shifting rhythms. The outstanding woodwind section — Emma Sholl (flute), Shefali Prior (oboe), and Alexander Morris (clarinet), and Todd Gibson-Cornish (bassoon) — created wonderfully flexible pairings, dancing around the bright upper-register violins of Alexandra Osborne and Emily Long, all securely anchored by the viola of Justin Williams, the cello of Timothy Nankervis and Jaan Pallandi’s resonant double bass. The horn of Euan Harvey added bold, incisive punches and fanfare-like calls throughout.
The audience showed their appreciation with enthusiastic and heartfelt applause. With three more Cocktail Hour events still to come in 2026, there’s every reason to book your next one soon.
Special thanks must go to Genevieve Lang, occasional SSO harpist and the delightful host of the series. Her warm welcome, deep musical knowledge, and infectious passion for chamber music added greatly to the enjoyment of the evening.
Photos Augustin Hadelich, Jay Patel and the author.
