Valeria Erandi González Gerwig was born in Bonn in 2009 into a family of musicians. At the age of just three, she received her first piano lessons from her parents Christine Gerwig and Efraín González. Just one year later, she was the youngest participant to win first prize at Jugend musiziert, as well as further prizes at the Bitburg, Nuremberg, and Henle piano competitions.
At the end of 2014, she and her brother Alejandro, who is two years older, began playing together as a piano duo and gave their first concerts in Bonn and the surrounding area. They celebrated further successes as a piano duo a year later at the Bechstein Competition in Berlin and in 2021 at the national competition Jugend musiziert, where they were the only piano duo to win first prize with the highest score and were also awarded the special prize of the Carl Bechstein Foundation and special prizes of the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, combined with a prize winners’ concert in Hamburg. Valeria was always classified as the younger member in the higher age group.
In 2021/22, Valeria joined the Precollege of the Cologne University of Music under Prof. Fabio Bidini. As a soloist, she was the only participant in her age group to win first prizes with maximum points at the regional level of the Jugend musiziert competition. In October 2022, Valeria was awarded the Debussy Special Prize at the Carl Bechstein Piano Competition in Berlin. At the national Jugend musiziert competition in Zwickau in 2023, she was awarded first prize with the highest score and will receive a scholarship from the Carl Bechstein Foundation. She will also receive the Carl Heinz Illies Scholarship from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben.
In 2016, Valeria performed a concert tour in various large venues in Mexico, including the Teatro Degollado in Guadalajara, the Cecut in Tijuana, and the Conservatorio de las Rosas in Morelia. Since then, she has performed regularly on stage, including at the Beethovenfest Bonn (Junge Bühne), the Woelflhaus and the Schlosskirche Bonn, in Munich as a member of the Pianistenclub, in Jena, in Monheim (Bechstein Sonderkonzerte), and elsewhere. Television appearances on shows such as “Little Big Stars” with Thomas Gottschalk, on WDR’s Lokalzeit, and on Mexican television have also made Valeria known beyond her home region. In May 2023, Valeria made her debut at the Bonn Opera with the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn under the baton of Dirk Kaftan, performing W. Szpilman’s Concertino. In June 2023, she will play in the concert for winners of the Federal Competition at the Cologne Philharmonic Hall.
At the age of 6, Valeria also wanted to play the violin. After two years of lessons, she switched to Prof. Koh Gabriel Kameda in Düsseldorf. She is also extremely successful on the violin, winning first prizes at various levels of the Jugend musiziert competition and several prizes in the national competition, which gave her the opportunity to receive a valuable German violin on loan from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben. In addition, Valeria has also been playing the viola since last year and is receiving lessons from Prof. Nathan Braude in Bonn. Since October, she has been loaned an old Italian viola from 1886 by the German Music Foundation. In 2023, she was selected as a scholarship recipient to participate in the international master class for string players “Astona” in Switzerland in the summer, as one of 32 participants worldwide.
She is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalia Children’s Orchestra and the Cologne Youth Symphony Orchestra (both as first violin), with which she performed in January 2023 under François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich Orchestra at the Cologne Philharmonic Hall. Together with her brother Alejandro, she has also been organizing concerts with mixed programs for some time, in which she performs with several instruments in the same concert.
Valeria speaks four languages fluently: German, Spanish, French at home, and English. She is entering ninth grade at the bilingual Friedrich Ebert Gymnasium in Bonn.
(2025)Fotos: Thorsten Eichhorst und privat
