Susan Lewis
Arts & Culture Senior ProducerAs senior producer of arts and culture, Susan writes and produces stories about music and the arts. She’s host and producer of WRTI’s TIME IN online interview series, and producer of The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert series, to which she also contributes weekly intermission interviews. She’s also been a regular host of WRTI’s Live from the Performance Studio sessions.
In her more than 15 years at WRTI, Susan has interviewed a wide range of leading artists including conductors and composers: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simon Rattle, Wynton Marsalis, Marin Alsop, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Christoph Eshenbach, Hannibal Locumbe, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jennifer Higdon, Donald Nally, John Adams, Valerie Coleman, Mason Bates; instrumentalists and vocalists: Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Itzak Perlman, Helene Grimaud, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Sharon Isbin, Andre Watts, Mark O’Connor, Angel Blue, Lawrence Brownlee, Jason Vieaux, Sarah Chang, and groundbreaking ensembles, including Imani Winds, PRISM Quartet, LA Guitar Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, and The Crossing, as well as people from the world of literature, theater and fine arts, including architect Frank Gehry, actors Dule Hill, Anna Deveare Smith, and playwrights Terry Teachout and the late Terrence McNally.
Susan came to radio with a background in journalism, speechwriting, and law, which she practiced in New York City; she also taught entertainment law at Rutgers Law School in Camden. A former freelance writer and columnist for Philadelphia Magazine, she’s also the author of Reinventing Ourselves after Motherhood and a book of essays titled, What is a Kiss, Anyway?
She lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband, goldendoodle, and whichever of her four grown kids pop in to visit.
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April 6, 2020. It's spring, and time to celebrate new life in classical music. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, now famous for his performance in the May, 2018 Royal… -
Although Handel’s Messiah is now regularly performed during the Christmas holidays, the work was actually premiered in the spring before Easter. WRTI’s…
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J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is a monumental oratorio that fell into obscurity for decades after Bach's death in 1750. Composer Felix Mendelssohn's…
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While sprawling forsythia herald the change of seasons like a silent trumpet fanfare, we hunker down inside or go out for walks at a safe social distance.…
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The symphony, as we know it today, underwent major changes from the end of the 18th to the late 19th century. As WRTI’s Susan Lewis reports, two…
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The wise 92-year-old, internationally renowned conductor Herbert Blomstedt said recently in an interview: “Music is a very spiritual art. I don’t say…
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An opera-ballet about a child and his enchanted toys and animals came into being in the wake of World War I. Maurice Ravel's L'enfant et les sortileges,…
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Pianist Emanual Ax, known both for both his virtuosity and genuine good nature, is drawn to the power and genius of Beethoven. You wouldn't know, just…
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Celebrate the season with us as we look back to Craft Works Music's visit to the WRTI Performance Studio last year to sing madrigals and other works…
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March 9, 2020. In For Love of You, pianist Lara Downes pays homage to the 19th-century pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, playing solo piano works…
