THIS year's Autumn in Malvern festival opened last week with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales last week at the University of Worcester Arena in Hylton Road.

The concert included performances of Elgar's Cello Concerto and Elegy, which forms part of the World War One commemorative strand running through the festival programme over the next few weeks.

And the concert has drawn an unprecedented number of appreciative messages and comments from audience members, says the festival's founder Peter Smith.

On Sunday, September 21, the World War One strand continues with The Path To Peace, a sequence of words and music on the life of war poet of Siegfried Sassoon and his connection with Malvern.

The event, at Great Malvern Priory, is performed by Malvern’s international award-winning chamber choir, Aldwyn Voices.

Bernadette Kearney, formerly presenter of BBC Midlands Today, is the reader and the Son String Quartet will play Elgar’s String Quartet of 1918 during the event at Great Malvern Priory.

Sassoon is also the subject of a talk at the Quaker Meeting House, Orchard Road, when the poet's biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson discusses her landmark study of his life. The talk is on Sunday, October 5, at 3pm.

Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, and actor Peter Sutton will be presenting Poets of the Malvern Hills Countryside, an evening of reflections and memories of the Great War interspersed with a performance of Elgar’s Violin Sonata written in 1918.

Providing the music at the event in the Great Hall at Malvern College on Friday, October 17, are the highly-acclaimed duo of Polish violinist Bartosz Woroch and pianist Sam Armstrong, and the programme includes Elgar's Violin Sonata, written in 1918.

And on the closing day of the festival, Sunfday, October 26, eminent actor Gabriel Woolf will join writer and founder of the Friends of the Dymock PoetsLinda Hart at Malvern Theatres to present Behind The Lines, a World War One anthology which explores, through poetry and prose, what people thought at home and what soldiers knew at the front.

Tickets for all events are available at the Malvern Theatres box office, Grange Road. For details, see malvernfestival.co.uk.