Newport Phil’s silver jubilee concert was both a celebration and a demonstration of musical and physical agility.

Among the most agile were musical director Guy Harbottle and his deputy, Martyn Jones. When not conducting they were accompanying at the keyboard and organ or climbing into the serried ranks to add their voice.

Formed in 1988 from the National Eisteddfod choir, the Phil have developed an unfailing memory for repertoire - their own form of agility - and boast one of the most audible contingents of male voices of any mixed choir in the area.

There were some hefty items in this concert and it was a rare pleasure to hear the gentlemen of the chorus actually giving their all and showing how depleted male numbers in other choirs upset the balance.

Also celebrating were the choir’s founding conductor, Alun Guy, and their second, Jeff Davies. Mr Guy brought his baton, too, wielding it with Cymanfa Ganu flamboyance in Eric Jones’s Y Tangnefeddwyr and his own arrangement of three Hungarian songs by Matyas Seiber. Turning to face the audience during the final bar of a piece was a delight, though something normally associated with a large tent and the echo of a thousand full-throated singers. Y Tangnefeddwyr, Jones’s setting of words by Waldo Williams on the wartime bombing of Swansea, was straight from the maes.

Mr Davies found the choir at its most galvanised in Rutter’s A Gaelic Blessing and Bob Chilcott’s arrangement of the Londonderry Air. In Frank Bridge’s The Goslings he showed how humour still requires concentration and tight control. The unaccompanied singing throughout, but especially from the start in Redford’s Rejoice in the Lord Alway and Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus, was an exemplary feature.

Mr Harbottle astonished everyone with Pierrot’s heartfelt bass aria from Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt and played Karl Jenkins’s Palladio with Mr Jones in an organ-keyboard duet arranged by the latter. They were the sort of things that made this concert seem as though it could choose almost anything from anywhere and in certain hope of doing it justice.

Jones the arranger was ubiquitous. He also embarked on someone else’s arrangement of tunes from Les Misérables as though we were going to hear the whole show. His version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was an interesting and tasteful variation on the original.

The guest soloist was mezzo Kate Woolveridge, deadly serious in the first half (Mozart and Handel) and coquettish in the second (Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter) after encouraging the audience - well, the gallery anyway - to sway nostalgically to Sieczynski‘s Vienna, City of my Dreams. Performing dangerously close to the VIPs in the front row, Ms Woolveridge knew how to seal the pact between raunchy lyrics and audience appreciation.

She also helped out the ladies of the chorus in an extended selection from West Side Story, with Mr Harbottle slipping over to Mr Jones’s keyboard in the white-heat section of America to add some additional zip. The only turkey for this reviewer was Mr Harbottle’s belief that Maria, essentially a solo piece as soulful as his Korngold item, could also work as a choral effort. One thinks not, but it was nicely delivered.

Who was worried anyway? If Messrs Harbottle, Jones, Davies and Guy had popped up with Ms Woolveridge to sing something from the Abba songbook, we wouldn’t have been surprised.

A busy and special celebratory night.