Whether he was worried about his beloved Aston Villa’s chances in this weekend’s League Cup final clash with Manchester Utd, or maybe it was a case of first night flutters, but Nigel Kennedy’s latest collaboration with the Sydney Symphony took a little while to warm up.

Nigel Kennedy's mix and match of Bach and Ellington worked well - for the most part.

As always keen to bend genres and break down the stuffiness of classical music concert etiquette, the 53-year-old English “cat with a Strad” is touring with a program of works by two disparate musical geniuses in Johann Sebastian Bach and Duke Ellington.

Switching throughout the evening between his acoustic violin and his carved-out five-string Violectric fiddle – naturally in the claret and blue of Villa’s home strip – Kennedy brought his trademark humour, irreverent showmanship and matchless technique to the Opera House for this four-concert series.

One of the delightful aspects of the Kennedy experience is his interaction with his fellow musicians, in this case led by his former classmate at Juilliard and SSO co-concertmaster Dene Olding, and his innate generosity. In this first concert he brought on stage young violinist Sonja Schebeck to play three duets by Bartok, having heard her perform at the Basement earlier.

There was a typical moment of humour when, after they’d performed, Sophia inadvertently picked up Kennedy’s score as well her own Bartok sheet music and nearly carried it off back to her aisle seat in the stalls.

After the somewhat flat opener of the first movement from Bach’s concerto in E, in which there was some uncharacteristic fudged intonation, Kennedy and his cohorts hit their stride in the lovely adagio from the same work.

Merging with the pared-down SSO musicians were members of Kennedy’s jazz quintet, although the sight of drummer Krzysztof Dziedzic’s brushing his way through Bach and Orphy Robinson’s marimba doubling with Neal Peres da Costa’s harpsichord did take a little getting used to. However, the mix and match worked well later on.

Things really started cooking halfway through the opening medley of Ellington tunes when Kennedy, Robinson and sax player Tomasz Grzegorski unleashed a thrilling three-part improvisation on In A Mellotone.

Kennedy and SSO principal cello Catherine Hewgill are sparring partners from previous concerts and their excerpts from Bach’s two-part inventions showed stunning speed and accuracy.

Kennedy’s next collaboration of the evening, with Olding in the largo from the double violin concerto, was sublimely played. But perhaps the highlight of the whole night was the deft interplay between Kennedy and Shefali Pryor in the D minor concerto for oboe and violin.

Ellington’s raucous “jungle music” special Cottontail made way for a magnificent soulful fiddle solo on Come Sunday from the Black, Brown and Beige jazz suite.

After the rousing finale of the allegro from Bach’s A minor concerto, Kennedy came back for some encores including a couple of rousing Scottish reels (or possibly strathspeys).

Any flatness from the first few minutes of this concert were by now dispelled by the bubbles of the complimentary magnum of Veuve Cliquot which Kennedy was tucking into – “it’s not easy downing this in one”.

This was a night that bore out Ellington’s memorable aphorism: “You know what it is about music? When it sounds good, it is good.”

The concert is repeated Friday, February 26, and Saturday, February 27, at 8pm and Monday, March 1, at 7pm.