Heidi Elise Bearcroft

M.Mus (Juilliard), B.Mus (Juilliard) Recently hailed by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette as a performer who plays “with a flair that we are coming to know well,” harpist Heidi Van Hoesen Gorton has been described as one of the most outstanding solo, chamber and orchestral musicians of her generation. She has been presented in solo recitals everywhere from New York to Los Angeles, Vancouver to Vienna. She is currently Principal Harp with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Hartford Symphony Orchestra with maestros Manfred Honeck, Andrew Davis, Marek Janowski, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, Gianandrea Noseda and James Levine. Ms. Van Hoesen earned two degrees in harp performance from The Juilliard School of Music under the tutelage of Nancy Allen, and has also studied with Gretchen Van Hoesen, Anne Marguerite-Michaud and Elizabeth Fontan-Binoche. She has been a member of the Sun Valley Summer Symphony (ID) since 2001, and has been a participant in the Strings Chamber Music Festival (Steamboat Springs, CO), National Repertory Orchestra (Breckenridge, CO), Aspen (CO) Tanglewood (Lenox, MA) andInterlochen (Traverse City, MI).Actively competing in domestic and international competitions, she was awarded first place in the Young Professional Division of the American Harp Society (AHS) National Competition in June of 2009. She has been a winner of the Anne Adams Awards (2010) held in Tacoma, as well as the Victor Salvi Awards (2008) held in Chicago. In 2004, she was winner of the Lennox Young Artist Competition playing Gliere’s Concerto for Harp and Orchestra and the 2005 Juilliard School concerto competition in Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp. In 2004 she was the First Prize winner of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA) National Solo Competition. She was invited back to ASTA to be a guest lecturer and master class clinician at the 2012 National Conference in Atlanta, GA. She has been featured twice as a soloist on ‘From the Top’ on NPR. Heidi has taught master-classes in Toronto (University of Toronto), Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon University), New Orleans (Tulane University), Charlotte, Denver, San Francisco, Syracuse, and Milwaukee. In 2010 she joined the faculty of the Advanced Chamber Music Seminar Summer Camp in Pittsburgh, PA.Professor Gorton can be reached at [email protected]