Heather Wittels, Violin

Biography

Violinist Heather Wittels is a member of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra and the Associate Concertmaster of the Glimmerglass Festival Opera Orchestra.  Her piano quartet and trio have performed annually on Live from WFMT in Chicago. 

Ms. Wittels was a Fellow of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida and a three-time Tanglewood Music Center Fellow.  She is a frequent recitalist and chamber musician, and performs a wide range of solo and chamber works from the Baroque to the contemporary era.  She has served as concertmaster of many orchestras, including the New World Symphony, the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra, the Chicago Beethoven Festival Orchestra, New England Conservatory’s Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia and Symphony (where she won a school-wide competition to lead Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben) and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra (where she led Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite and Don Juan under the direction of Raphael Frübeck de Burgos). 

She made her solo debut in June 2001, performing the Khachaturian Violin Concerto with the NEC Youth Philharmonic Orchestra in Jordan Hall, Boston.  The Boston Globe said she made a “dazzling impression”.  In 2009 she gave the American premiere of the violin concerto Bulls of Bashan by Gavin Bryars at the Spoleto Festival USA, for which the Strad Magazine praised her “pure, singing tone”. 

She graduated cum laude from Yale University with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, with distinction.  Subsequently she earned a Masters in Music and Graduate Diploma in violin performance in the studio of Malcolm Lowe at the New England Conservatory, as beneficiary of the 2007 Tourjée Alumni Award for graduate study.  A native of Brookline, MA, Heather began the violin at age three.