Biography
Aurelia Shimkus was born in Latvia in 1997. She started playing the piano at the age of four. From 2017-2020, she studied at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne with Prof. Claudio Martinez-Mehner. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Ingesund Piano Center (Sweden).
Aurelija took part in master classes of world-renowned pianists such as Prof. Milana Chernyavska, Prof. Dominique Merlet, Bernd Goetzke, Pavel Gililov, Peter Jablonski, Ian Fountain and others. She also receives a scholarship from the Liechtenstein International Music Academy and regularly takes part in the intensive weeks and activities of the Academy.
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Aurelija has won numerous national piano competitions. Among other things, she won the 1st prize at the Latvian "Competition for Young Pianists" at the age of nine (and six years later) and was a prizewinner at the "Kissinger Piano Olympics" competition in 2013.
At the age of eleven, Aurelija gave her first solo concert at the International Chamber Music Festival in Kaunas (Lithuania) and made her German debut in 2013 with a solo recital in Herdecke. She has worked with the English Chamber Orchestra, the Dortmund Philharmonic, the German State Philharmonic Rhineland-Palatinate, the Georgian Chamber Orchestra Ingolstadt, the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra, the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and the Kaunas Philharmonic Orchestra, among others.
So far, she has been heard in the Tonhalle Zurich, the Rheingoldhalle Mainz, the Dortmunder Konzerthaus, the Karlsruher Konzerthaus, the Stadthalle Bayreuth and at international music festivals such as the Kurt Weill Festival (Dessau), the Kissinger Sommer (Bad Kissingen), the Schumann Festival Bonn, the Interlaken Classics Festival (Switzerland), the Next Generation Festival in Bad-Ragaz (Switzerland), the Puplinge Classique (Switzerland), the Meister Von Morgen Festival (Herdeke) as well as in the Philharmonie Berlin in April 2022.
Aurelia was commissioned to record “B-A-C-H; Ich ruf' zu Dir" in the category Young Artist of the Year with "Echo Klassik 2016". In 2014, she was a scholarship holder of the Mozart Society Dortmund.