A VIOLINIST who grew up in West Malling is taking centre stage in a series of major London concerts commemorating the First World War.

Thomas Kemp's critically-acclaimed international ensemble Chamber Domaine will open its Composers at War series on Wednesday, September 19, at the West End's Wigmore Hall.

The series, devised by Mr Kemp in association with the Imperial War Museum, will explore the impact of the Great War on the music of a wide variety of British composers many of whom served in the armed forces.

Two other concerts - at St John's Smith Square on November 6 and at the Imperial War Museum the following day - will be performed in conjunction with a programme of lecture recitals at London's Morley College.

The group will also be performing music by Arthur Bliss, Gerald Finzi and Roger Quilter in a live broadcast on BBC Radio 3's In Tune on Tuesday, September 18.

Among the composers featured in the series are Ernest Farrar and George Butterworth, who were both killed in action, and Ivor Guerney who suffered severe trauma from shell shock and spent the last 10 years of his life in a mental hospital in Dartford.

The programme also includes music by two other composers with Kentish links - Peter Warlock and Ernest Moeran who lived in Eynsford. Moeran, a despatch rider, suffered serious head injuries at Passchendaele.

Chamber Domaine will also perform major works by Elgar and by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who enlisted at the age of 42 as a medical orderly.

Mr Kemp, 30, who used to live in Town Hill, West Malling, first took up violin while at West Malling Primary School. He studied with the late Gillian Sansom, a well-known violinist who lived in Maidstone, and was also a Saturday pupil at the Kent School of Music and a member of the Kent Youth orchestra.

He said: "Despite the horrors of trench warfare experienced by the many composers featured in the series, the music is often cheerful and nostalgic. Most of it points to homesickness rather than the brutal and bloody nightmare of total war."