The Leicester International Music Festival was founded in 1989, building on a long history of concerts in New Walk, at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery

Nicholas Daniel, the distinguished British oboist and conductor, was appointed as Artistic Director in April 2003. The Festival's distinguished Patrons are the composers Sir James McMillan KBE and Thea Musgrave CBE, the historian, lecturer and broadcaster, Lars Tharp and the conductor, Paul McCreesh.

During WWII, the Director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark, re-opened the empty building, and quickly turned it into a major centre of cultural activities, with temporary exhibitions of living artists, educational and social activities, and one of London’s major venues for musical concerts and recitals. The pattern was repeated in towns and cities across the country, including Leicester where the Museum Director, Trevor Thomas saw the possibility of filling New Walk Museum with just such a  programme.

Thomas arranged the purchase of an extremely good second-hand grand piano for the Art Gallery/Lecture Hall, in partnership with CEMA (the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts of which Clark was a founder and its key influence. CEMA was the predecessor of the post-war Arts Council of Great Britain, now Arts Council England)

He then instigated the first Museum’s lunchtime concerts as part of the summer 1943 “Holidays at Home” activities. These quickly became a regular and most popular feature of the New Walk Museum’s winter programme and after the war continued as a permanent annual fixture in the museum calendar, continuing to the present.

LIMF continues to attract international recognition for the high quality of its musical performances, attracting world-class musicians to its programme of 12 lunchtime concerts and assembling a superb team of artists for the annual Festival in the third week of September.