Classical music in Newport is a lot about connections at the moment.

Sinfonia Cymru, the Principality's orchestra of smart young professionals, has an arrangement to perform regularly at the Riverfront. Its hived-off members are also contracted to play as chamber music groups at the theatre's First Wednesday lunchtime concerts.

The latest of these, a piano trio with Gareth Jones, the orchestra's founder and conductor, at the keyboard and two high-fliers at the violin and cello desks drew a capacity audience.

Many present were family and friends of violinist Rhys Watkins, son of the legendary Newport rugby player Stuart and now with the London Symphony Orchestra.

His equal in status among the orchestra's former members was award-winning cellist Steffan Morris, who is studying with the great Heinrich Schiff in Vienna.

This necessary preamble steals space that rightly belongs to reporting the trio's sustained quality of performance in Mozart's Trio No 6 in G (K.564) and Brahms's Trio No 2 in C Op. 87.

The term 'scratch trio', though accurate, does the three musicians no justice in terms of their vigour and unity of intent, both contributed to and controlled with great transparency by the pianist in parts to which both string players are continuously indebted.

This was true of the Mozart, a flawless essay despite its one resort to variation form, and spectacularly so in the Brahms. Here the violinist was in swashbuckling mood, the cellist almost self-effacingly sonorous, and the trio often sounding like more than three instruments even where Brahms’s use of the double-stop makes it appear so.