TICKETS for this year's Autumn in Malvern festival will be going on sale next week.

The festival, which had been held every year, since 1989, is based on classical music, with string literary and visual arts elements.

Among the musical highlights of this year's event will be a concert given by violinist Roman Simovic and Friends at Great Malvern Priory.

Simovic is leader of the London Symphony Orchestra who, with his wife, Milena, will perform the rarely heard Sonata for Two Violins by Prokofiev.

The programme also includes works associated with the year 1918, including string quartets by Elgar and Debussy, and Stravinsky's Three Pieces.

Award-winning band Sovereign Brass present a free concert in Malvern Theatres with music by Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Aaron Copland, as well as Leonard Bernstein's Suite from West Side Story.

The Great Hall at Malvern College is the venue for a concert by the Royal Northern College of Music Ensemble, which will perform works by Haydn, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich.

Also in the Great Hall is a sequence of music, poetry and prose entitled The Silence in our Hearts marking the centenary of the ending of the Great War.

The centrepiece is a performance of Elgar's Violin Sonata by Miriam Kramer on violin and Nicholas Durcan on piano.

Peter Sutton is the narrator with Malvern's distinguished Aldwyn Voices singing music by Thomas Tallis, Edward Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Edgar Day and William Walton.

Other events include a screening of a BBC film on Leonard Bernstein, marking the centenary of his birth, and illustrated talks on Dame Laura Knight, the Dymock Poets, Edward Elgar and Sir Frederick Ouseley.

Pamela Hurle's new biography of Lady Emily Foley is launched at the festival, accompanied by her illustrated talk, and the Beauchamp Community is the venue for our free talks on cathedral music.

The Big Draw is celebrated at the Theatre of Small Convenience, with street music at the arts and crafts market in the Priory Churchyard, and exhibitions in the library and the Priory. And historian Brian Iles will lead a walk around Malvern's commemorative plaques.

Booking opens on Wednesday, August 1, and to find out more, contact 01684 892277 or malvernfestival.co.uk.