THIS year’s Hexham Abbey Festival marks the centenary of the end of the First World War and pays tribute to all the lives lost.

The president of Hexham Abbey Festival, Canon Dagmar Winter, said: “The year 1918 is seared into the collective memory of people across Europe, and a century later the festival marks the end of the First World War with eight contrasting events.”

An appearance by Simon Armitage, vice-president of the Poetry Society, current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and award-winning poet in general, will be one of the highlights of the festival.

He will be discussing the challenges of writing his First World War project, Still . The collection comprises images of battlefields, including the Somme, and the poems they inspired.

Armitage has said of his collection: “There are many thousands of aerial and reconnaissance photographs of the First World War that offer an unfamiliar and rarely-seen visual perspective of the conflict.

“Map-like images of cratered fields and hieroglyphic trench patterns; dreamlike ‘obliques’ showing landscapes of sepia-toned towns and ghostly villages; panoramas of apparently tranquil meadows and country lanes that disguise more macabre details.”

He said Still was the result of a dialogue between military documents of the day and the poetic responses they had provoked 100 years later.

The poet will also be talking about The Not Dead and The Great War: An Elegy, the hour-long Culture Show special he produced for the BBC.

The seven poems he wrote for that particular project enshrined the stories he picked up during a journey that took him from Northern France to the village of Brora in the Scottish Highlands.

This year’s performance from The Hexham Abbey Festival Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by David Murray, will include Dona Nobis Pacem , composed by anti-war protester Vaughan Williams, who actually fought in the First World War himself.

It was the trauma of war which inspired Vaughan to compose this symphony in the late 1930s as both a dark reflection of the war he has just witnessed and a plea for peace during the international tensions of the time, which Williams feared would lead to another war.

Vaughan Williams is also on the programme for this year’s Candlelight Concert, the highlight of the Hexham Abbey Festival. Starring British solo-voice ensemble I Fagiolini, they will also be presenting a range of Italian High Renaissance pieces, including numbers from Monteverdi, Tomkins, Ravenscroft, Purcell and Adrian Williams.

The Big Sing workshop will return to the festival once again, hosted by professional singer and musician Sandra Kerr. Participants will learn and perform a range of songs including traditional numbers from the First World War and the Suffragette campaign, alongside some Northumbrian folk numbers.

Meanwhile, tenor Joshua Ellicott will present a musical and spoken word piece called From Your Ever-Loving Son Jack, based on the letters written by his great-uncle Jack Ellicott just months before he died on the Somme.

In a brass and organ concert, The Wallace Collection will join forces with organist Professor John Butt to present a war inspired piece and a selection of early Venetian music by Monteverdi, Gabrieli and Viadana.

Hexham Brass, conducted by Frank O’Connor, also makes its annual appearance to perform music from the period of the First World War.

Also putting in appearances at the festival are The Festival Choral Eucharist, the Hexham Abbey Festival Winds, jazz quartet Blue Note, Hexham Abbey’s Girls Choir and The Hexham Abbey’s bell ringers.

The Hexham Forum Cinema will also be showing the 1932 war-themed film A Farewell to Arms.

Hexham Abbey Festival will run from Thursday, September 27 till Sunday, September 30.