Sinfonia Cymru is a diverse concept as well as a terrific young orchestra of professionals, a fact illustrated by this performance from beginning to end.

On its latest short tour, numbers were reduced for five 20th-century chamber works, one of them in an original scoring as spare as the fuller versions is padded.

Also, founder-conductor Gareth Jones withdrew temporarily for rising American maestro Ben Gernon to take charge, which he did with the sort of flair that inspires by example.

The most populous work (17 musicians on call) and the one requiring the most sustained prowess was Ibert’s Divertissement. Ibert asks the musicians to tackle the piece line abreast, upbeat and tongue-in-cheek, whereas Ravel in his Introduction and Allegro and Debussy in his Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane encourage ebb and flow, and a certain amount of reflective longing for the antique.

The guide here and in William Mathias’s exquisite Melos was harpist Catrin Finch, a huge musical personality but one who easily assumed the role of first among equals, sharing governance with flautist Sarah Bennett, percussionist Rhys Matthews, and the strings, which were led with authority as well as insistence on unanimity by Bartosz Woroch.

Ms Finch made the proceedings even more intimate by stepping forward between the Ravel and the Debussy to explain how the two works came about, with a story of instrument-makers and the composers they commissioned to demonstrate their products. It was typical of a musician who wears her prodigious capabilities lightly.

Chamber music is a test of a musician’s exposure, few works more so in the al fresco, New World style than Copland’s original 13-instrument scoring for his ballet Appalachian Spring, the epitome of sparseness and economy yet ever witness to the miracle of shifting mood and metre about a homespun narrative.

Gernon, on home ground, and the orchestra made it as timeless as the merriment elsewhere was smilingly of the moment.

The Sunday afternoon timing at the Riverfront seems like a good move for the orchestra, who normally finish its tours in Newport with an evening concert. And little refinements of presentation, such as the orchestra's name tastefully projected on to the stage's back curtain, consolidate its association with the city and the theatre.