Heather Wittels
Violin / Concertmaster
Heather Wittels is a member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra first violin section where she was the co-Acting Assistant Concertmaster for the 2022-3 seasons. She is the Director of Chamber Music at the University of Chicago, and Artist Faculty at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts. Starting in 2022, Heather spends her summers serving as Concertmaster of the AIMS Festival Orchestra in Graz, Austria. Prior to that she was the Associate Concertmaster of the Glimmerglass Opera Festival Orchestra in Cooperstown, New York. She performs as a principal player with the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago and the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a regular substitute violinist with both The Cleveland Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
She has performed the Brahms and Tchaikovsky violin concertos and the Beethoven Triple Concerto with orchestras in Chicago, where reviewers praised her “exquisite taste” and “immaculate technique”. She has performed solo and as a chamber musician in Chicago on the Rush Hour Concert series, Fourth Presbyterian Church’s popular Friday Noonday Concert series, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series, Henry Fogel Presents, Live from WFMT on the radio, and on Wisconsin’s The Midday radio show, as well as at the Illinois Holocaust Museum.
Heather 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. She was a Fellow of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida and a three time Tanglewood Music Center Fellow. A native of Brookline, MA, Heather began the violin at age three.