A lover of classical music, Switzerland’s ambassador to Bulgaria Raymund Furrer speaks with smiling enthusiasm about this year’s 10 Allegra Festival and Academy, of which the embassy is once again the patron. For Furrer, the Allegra Festival – which saw its beginnings in Rousse before transferring to Bulgaria’s capital Sofia – is a project “which has an underlying philosophy of bringing talented musicians together and doing something creative, a very laudable, very noble initiative”. Asked how long it took for the embassy to decide whether to continue its patronage of the festival, he says that any such decision has two aspects – the functional and the emotional.
“The emotional one was very easy – it is so likeable, the collaboration between Bulgaria and Switzerland, the interplay, the engagement of youth – it was a no-brainer,” he says. The 2024 festival programme includes many composers from Furrer’s personal top 10 favourites list. This year’s characteristically rich includes Strauss, Mozart, Dvořák, Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Ravel, Debussy, Mahler, Korngold, Gadé, Bruch Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Glazunov, Mendelssohn Vladigerov (notably, born in Zurich) and Beethoven.
He applauds the festival’s approach of a mixture of works by composers, those well-known to audiences and those perhaps less well-known: “I like to exposed to something I don’t necessarily know”. So too, there is a “lightness” to the programme, appropriate for the.