Cerys Matthews can sing and write songs and Catrin Finch can play the harp and write music but neither is up to the twists, leaps and turns of ballet.

Just for a laugh, they had a go at the end of their evening collaboration with Newport-based Ballet Cymru as everyone lined up for curtain calls. The results got them applause from a delighted capacity audience but no chance of an audition.

It was just as well that division of labour was strictly demarcated, for Cerys’s songs and Catrin’s Celtic Concerto were splendidly choreographed by Ballet Cymru’s Darius James and Amy Doughty and performed by the company in what was partly a homage to a pair of Welsh musical icons.

Finch’s music, in which she played the harp solo and was supported by musicians from Sinfonia Cymru, gravitates towards an epicentre both mournful and elegiac and this was exactly personified by the dancers.

The approach of the choreographers in both collaborations was based on free assembly, in which the spotlight fell on single or interacting groups. It caught perfectly the intimacy and elasticity of the occasion.

Cerys’s set, called Tir (Welsh for ‘land’) consisted of the singer plus guitar perched stage left and exploring traditional Welsh airs such as Dafydd y Garreg Wen, Myfanwy and Ar Hyd y Nos. The dance movements with their improvised character were seemingly conjured by the music itself. There were also more modern ditties, freely interpreted.

Cerys is always a hoot and her introductions were no exception. But like Finch’s, her musicianship was original and deadly serious - except when trying to upstage the dancers, who were Lydia Arnoux, Sam Bishop, Iselin Bowen, Nicolas Capelle, Emily Pimm Edwards, Krystal Lowe, Shaun Mendum, Daisuke Miura, Daniel Morrison and Mandev Sokhi. They were terrific, and performed these routines with the highest degree of interpretative skill. And to think that they're based here, among us. We really should be so lucky.