Violinist Eliot Heaton recently won a position in the Philadelphia Orchestra which he will begin in July of 2024. During the summer of 2024, he will also perform as Concertmaster of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra for a part of their season. Eliot is currently tenured as Concertmaster of the Detroit Opera and Des Moines Metro Opera. He has served as Concertmaster with the Lansing Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, Terre Haute Symphony, and the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic. He has also performed in the sections of the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Detroit Symphony.

            

Eliot has appeared as a soloist with a number of orchestras throughout the midwest, performing a wide variety of concertos from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. He also performs regularly on a number of chamber series, including Chamber Soloists of Detroit, the Scarab Club, New Music Detroit, the Geneva Music Festival, and Manchester Summer Chamber Music.

            

Eliot was a double major at Oberlin College and Conservatory, earning degrees in History and in violin performance, the latter with Professor Marilyn McDonald.  He later received his Master of Music degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, studying violin with Professor Kevork Mardirossian and completing an outside area specialty in jazz studies. When he’s not playing the violin, he enjoys reading, tennis, and spending time with his wife and their two cats. Eliot plays on a 2019 Joseph Curtin violin.