Among choral societies battling successfully to give one-off concerts that can each cost around £8,000, Monmouth's is one of the country's most enterprising.

It continues to thrive in all quarters and remains undaunted by the nationwide depletion of public funds for the arts being poached by th is year's cash-leeching and ever-more-expensive Olympic Games.

In 2008, the society sang Brahms's A German Requiem in the town by employing an accompanying chamber orchestra, its usual way of doing things. The orchestra, playing to its fee, also performed Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

This year, it was a case of coat-cutting according to cloth, with piano duettists replacing the orchestra, and the concert consisting of just the Requiem - if 'just' is the right word.

But everything was done resourcefully and with style, and not just the singing. The pianists were Matthew Morley, sometime assistant chorus master of English National Opera, and Peter King, director of music at Bath Abbey; the piano reduction score was a delight in itself if not wholly preferable to an orchestra; and the fitting soloists were Colin Copestake from the choir's ranks, and soprano Helen Pugsley, who sings in conductor Huw Williams's Cantemus Chamber Choir in Cardiff.

Mr Williams was once more at the top of his game, especially in dealing with Brahms's trickier tempos and making of the work an entity that leads via glorious set-pieces - in which death and lamentation are dealt with at a temporal level - to the powerfully concluding episodes from the Book of Revelation.

He even appeared to minimise a relative shortage of male choristers, the problem Monmouth shares with so many mixed -voice ensembles.

All in all, a job well done.