If cultural gongs were being awarded for contributions to the city’s 2010 Festival, the Priory Singers and musical director Stephen Benavente would head the queue.

Theirs would be for public-spiritedness in giving the world première of a work by a local composer and accomplishment in preparing it for performance at the earliest available opportunity.

Michael Elliott’s A Newport Elegy commemorates those killed in a docks disaster a century ago. It didn’t take up much of the Priory Singers’ spring concert, but its reverberations were widespread.

This was because it included parts for piano duo played by Claire and Antoinette Cann, one of the world’s foremost keyboard pairings, who elsewhere helped stitch a kaleidoscopic programme together.

The Elegy is another example of Mr Elliott’s gift for stylish concentration of effect, one shared with his old composition teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, Lennox Berkeley.

It sets stirring words by Townsend Collins, the Argus editor at the time of the incident, but with a subdued and measured progress and fitting harmonies. The poem was movingly read before the performance by Monty Dart.

The composer couldn’t have asked for a more discriminating choral performance, the choir’s conviction and clean, uncluttered voice also lifting works by Tippett and Stanford.

The Canns made sure that Malpas Church School Junior Choir took two-part singing in its stride in arias from Die Fledermaus and joined them and the adults for Westlife’s You Raise Me Up.

Piano duo show-stealers otherwise kept the twins busy. If Michael Elliott’s Geminae is not yet one them, it should be.