Pianist and Spoleto’s founding Artistic Director of Chamber Music Charles Wadsworth died May 29, in New York City. He was 96.

Wadsworth studied at The Julliard School where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. In 1959, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti invited Wadsworth, then just 30 years old, to develop a chamber music concert series for his Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. Following the success of the Italian concert series, Lincoln Center commissioned Wadsworth to establish a chamber music series within the evolving cultural landmark. And when Menotti planned the inaugural Spoleto Festival USA, he asked Wadsworth to replicate the chamber music series design in Charleston. Today, Spoleto’s twice-daily chamber music concerts remain a Festival bedrock. Wadsworth served both Spoleto festivals for 50 years.

In his career, Wadsworth’s programming included commissions of more than 65 new chamber music works from illustrious composers such as Boulez, Barber, and Leonard Bernstein, as well as William Bolcom and John Corgliano. He brought to public attention then-emerging artists, including Richard Goode, Paula Robison, Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Pinchas Zukerman, and Jessye Norman, among others.

As a pianist, his performance calendar included engagements at The White House, playing for Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

Wadsworth received numerous honorary degrees, prestigious awards from the nations of France and Italy, the City of New York’s Handel Medallion, and the Order of the Palmetto as well as the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts in South Carolina. In 2012, he was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

He is survived by his wife, Susan Wadsworth, the founder of Young Concert Artists, his children and grandchildren.