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Heather Wittels is a member of the first violin section of
the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra and the Associate
Concertmaster of the Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra in
Cooperstown, NY. In the 2011-12 season she will perform
on the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series in the
Chicago Cultural Center, which will be broadcast on
WFMT radio. Heather was a Fellow of the New World
Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida during the 2008-9
season, and before that was a Tanglewood Music Center
Fellow in the summers of 2005-7. She is a frequent
recitalist, 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, 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). Heather 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". Most recently she gave the
American premiere of the violin concerto Bulls of Bashan
by Gavin Bryars at the 2009 Spoleto Festival USA, for
which the Strad Magazine praised her "pure, singing tone".
In 2005, Heather graduated cum laude from Yale University
with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, with distinction.
Subsequently she earned an MM and GD 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.