Newport Phil’s concerts not only concentrate the minds of its audience but also show how much thought went into the choice of music.

Fauré’s Requiem was surrounded by a few of his smaller pieces and works of a similar tone from the same late 19th century period.

Also included, in clever imitation of French art song, was the Wales premiere of Andrew Aston’s Au Rossignol for choir, soprano and orchestra.

However, its solo part lay too low to be heard clearly against the rest of the music. Angela Kazimierczuk’s line was often muffled or effaced. Perhaps a recording will pick it up. Ms Kazimierczuk, an experienced performer and frequent guest for Newport Philharmonic, must have known that all was not perfect.

The result was also partly to do with conditions on the night. The interior of St Paul’s no longer has the lofty space into which the evening’s ethereal sounds could soar and in which musicians and the capacity audience could feel and look anything other than cramped and over-crowded.

Conductor Guy Harbottle turned this to advantage in giving the Requiem more dynamic variety than it traditionally merits, and making sure that the soprano’s Pie Jesu and baritone Luke Williams’s Libera Me were full frontal.

That said, it cannot have been other than gratifying to see such a pleasing turnout, and one wonders whether or not the decision to opt for a church setting might have benefited from a more considered survey of those buildings that would have offered a more appropriate acoustic.

Mr Harbottle had signalled his intent in that surge before the choral entry in the Méditation from Massenet’s opera Thais, for which Welsh Concert Orchestra leader Barry Haskey played the saccharine-sweet tune. The Requiem proved to be typical of the this conductor’s eagerness to move events along without much lessening of those episodes in which the composer’s invitation is to linger The Nidus Children’s Choir acquitted itself well in Fauré’s Tantum Ergo and Ave Verum, in which it was conducted by Christian Jenkins, and in the Requiem’s In Paradisum, the first two after the adults had opened with the composer’s Pavane in the choral version, with its trashy poetry by de Montesquieu - historically interesting but not an improvement on the orchestra-only one. The children, stationed on the adult choristers’ flank, might have been usefully embedded somewhere. The wait for its final sing was lengthy but it must learn not to fidget and giggle. It’s all part of growing up as performers in public places. But what a joy to see the youngsters in grown-up company. They are the heirs to a future of which many keepers of the choral tradition despair, so infrequently can choirs and their audiences attract anyone aged under forty to music of this sort.

Once again, the ever-dependable David Martyn Jones, the Phil’s deputy MD, manned the organ consoles with discipline as part of the orchestral sound and with sensitivity as a prominent voice, particularly for the children in the Requiem’s final section.