Susan Wadsworth

Susan Wadsworth. Susan Wadsworth is the Director of Young Concert Artists, Inc., the unique non profit organization which she founded in l961, dedicated to discovering and launching the careers of gifted musicians from all over the world.

The Young Concert Artists Series is renowned for presenting the first recitals of such celebrated musicians as pianists Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Richard Goode; the violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Chee-Yun, and Ani and Ida Kavafian; the cellists Carter Brey and Fred Sherry, and the soprano Dawn Upshaw.

The Young Concert Artists Series is now presented in New York at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center, and in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center.

Ms Wadsworth’s organization set the standard for assistance to young musicians, developing the first non-profit management in the world, providing individual guidance, management services and performance opportunities to the artists chosen through the annual Young Concert Artists International Auditions each year.

Ms Wadsworth accepted the 2005 Angel Award presented to Young Concert Artists by the International Society of Performing Arts Administrators. In 1993, at the request of Isaac Stern, Susan Wadsworth brought a concert of YCA artists to an evening at the White House for President and Ms Clinton, honoring the recipients of the National Medal of Arts.

Wadsworth has received Honorary Doctorates from the Mannes College of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, and New England Conservatory. In 1999 Wadsworth was honored as a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. Ms Wadsworth is an Honorary Director of Young Concert Artists Trust in London, England, which she helped to found. With her husband, the pianist Charles Wadsworth, she received an Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the Third Street Music School Settlement.

Wadsworth has served on numerous music competition Juries, including the Mieczyslaw Munz Piano Scholarship Competition, the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition, the Vendôme Piano Competition and concerto competitions at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, the Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Yale School of Music.

She has given seminars on performing careers at the TCU/Cliburn Piano Institute in Fort Worth, the University of Maryland, Rutgers University, the Mannes, Peabody and Juilliard Schools, and the North Carolina School of the Arts, and at the Cartagena Festival Internacional de Musica in Colombia. She has also participated on conference panels for The Aspen Institute and the American Symphony Orchestra League.

Wadsworth authored a chapter in The Musical Woman, an anthology published by Greenwood Press.She has served as a consultant to the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a member of the National Advisory Committees of the Avery Fisher Prize Program, the Van Cliburn Competition and Young Audiences, Inc.

Susan Wadsworth was born in New York City. She studied piano with the Polish pianist Mieczyslaw Munz.

She earned a BA in English from Vassar College, where she also studied piano and violin and was a member of the Vassar Orchestra and Chorus. Wadsworth attended the Fontainebleau Conservatory in France, studying with Jean Casadesus and Nadia Boulanger, and also studied violin and piano at the Mannes College of Music.