Led by John Edwards, the first Sydney concert took place on Wednesday 7 June 1826 in the Large Room at the Freemason's Tavern on George Street, Sydney.

The press wrote in anticipation of the concerts that they were a sign that Sydney was finally becoming respectable. It was ‘proof of the rapid progress of Taste in the fine arts’, according to The Monitor. The same paper praised this ‘zealous attempt to promote public sociability through the medium of so innocent a recreation as a Concert of well-selected music’. 

The Australian focused on the venue ‘not so well calculated for the purposes of a concert’, and the crowd a ‘numerous and respectable group… the ladies forming a third proportion’. Although it was unfortunate that ‘one or two cracked male voices, from among the audience, which every now and then, but seldom at the proper time, attempted to chime in most unharmoniously; producing any effect but a good one’.