The Llantwit Major Chamber Music Festival, founded in 2019 by local Welsh cellist Ben Tarlton, aims to present accessible and outstanding live classical music concerts to the community of Llantwit Major and inspire the next generation of young music lovers. Our vision is increasingly attracting local enthusiasm and the response we have received from our audience is showing that we are providing a source of comfort and well-being to those we reach through live music, making a memorable and sometimes profound impact to people’s lives. 
 
We believe that sharing and displaying the passion for classical music needs to stretch beyond our Festival’s concerts and into local schools and care homes in order to reach a wider and more diverse range of the community to further normalise classical music listening.

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Thanks to the generous support of the Waterloo Foundation, over the course of the next two years, we will be bringing the musicians who are at the heart of making our Festival, into local schools and care homes where we aim to provide to those who are not able to have access to live music. We have seen from our concerts that in-person live performances can truly help the mental well-being of others as well as promote inner peace, empathy and kindness to those reached, which is why we are inspired to bring this directly to other areas of the local community outside our main concerts. We aspire to make our work more interactive, having pupils participating, not just observing. 
 

This is already becoming an integral part of the Festival’s ethos where this March, our Festival performers gave performances and workshops at Llanfair Primary School, Ysgol Dewi Sant and St Donats Atlantic College, working with roughly 200 pupils. From the connections we have made at these local schools, it is apparent that there is currently a gap and interest in the Vale of Glamorgan for the kind of service we feel we can offer. 

We are passionate about making a positive impact to the community and by enabling live music making to be a more integral part of local society, we feel that this is creating an opportunity to inspire and empower the next generation of creative individuals. We are incredibly grateful to the Waterloo Foundation for their support and are hugely looking forward to expanding our outreach program.