Violinist Eliot Heaton is the current Concertmaster of the Detroit Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, and the Saginaw Bay Symphony. He previously served as Concertmaster of the Terre Haute Symphony and Oberlin Symphony orchestras, and has played as guest Concertmaster with the Chautauqua Symphony, Lansing Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, and the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic. He also plays as an extra musician in both the Detroit and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras.
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.