This concert of mainly devotional English music was called Hope & Glory but it was more significantly a hymn to continuity.

Coleg Gwent Chorale is the re-incarnation of Cross Keys College Choral Society, which renounced its name when founder-conductor Martin Hodson handed over the baton to Paul Cook after thirty years.

Mr Hodson, ever the self-effacing enthusiast, now sings in the choir's bass section. He would have been pleased to see soprano Jill Padfield as the soloist in John Rutter's popular Requiem, as she is both a former Cross Keys student and has been a frequent guest at society concerts.

What continues most obviously is the generous size of the choir and the audible input (and output) of its male contingent.

Combined with an expanded Welsh Sinfonia, the choir's oceanic capabilities threatened to engulf baritone soloist Dyfed Wyn Evans in the more jubilant sections of the Five Mystical Songs by Vaughan Williams, a work first performed in Wales at the Newport Central Hall in 1920.

This may have been a little to do with the new and therefore unfamiliar acoustic space at the Cross Keys campus sports hall. Now the chorale's concert base, it will offer Mr Cook an opportunity to get the balance right.

No problem on that score in Rutter's anthem I Will Sing With The Spirit or in the Requiem, which requires more gravity than the composer's light and unvaryingly sentimental touch can summon. With Ms Padfield trilling sweetly, the choir embraced its subdued emotion, fertile harmonies, snatches of plainchant and over-arching shape.

The orchestra warmed up with Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody.