Bulgaria: Tradition and talent to captivate in Allegra Festival and Academy 10th anniversary edition

Between July 6 and 21 2024, Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia will welcome top stars of the classical music scene with a remarkable concert programme and master classes.

For a 10th consecutive year, the Allegra Festival and Academy keeps elevating the bar for talent and good taste with an ambitious programme featuring leading guest stars from the world classical music scene.

The anniversary edition of the festival is a real challenge not only for its founder, Petar Naydenov, but also for the great professionals who consider Allegra a proven territory for bold experiments and a focal point for Europe’s most inspiring and respected classical musicians.

The diverse programme with interesting accents and unusual stage tandems will once again provoke the music lovers to save six dates in their calendars during which Sofia will vibrate to the frequency of the eternal classics.

The Allegra Festival has already conquered a proud position on the European classical music festival map. Captivating talented women will inspire from the stage, confirming that women are not only muses, but also active participants in the re-imagining of the fantasies of the great composers. Albena Danailova, Elena Garlitsky, Öykü Canpolat-Rast and Lora Markova are the gentle ambassadors of this message.

Over the years, the Allegra team has transformed the Festival and Academy participants into one big family that shares music’s joint mission and pleasure. Continuity is the direction in which Allegra takes not only the concert programme, but also the Academy series of master classes.

Over the course of 10 days, you will enjoy a variety of music spanning the entire spectrum of the classics – from duet, quartet, and octet to chamber and symphony orchestra. From Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Glazunov to Kurt Weill, Korngold, Piazzolla, and Miles Davis.

As has become a tradition, the Festival opening concert builds a delicate bridge between the old and the new edition, with the idea that in music, as in art, continuity is a fundamental principle.

The Bulgarian audience will once again applaud their great favourite from the 2023 festival – Ukrainian virtuoso Valeriy Sokolov together with one of Allegra’s greatest friends – maestro Johannes Schlaefli. They will present an intricate repertoire of works by Johann Strauss, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonin Dvorak.

Three days later, on July 15, Eckart Runge, cello, and Jacques Ammon, piano, will take the audience back to the 1920s Berlin. The concert, titled “Lights and Shadows of the 1920s”, embraces late romanticism, hints at the new rhythms of jazz and culminates in a diverse eclecticism of tango, jazz and film music.

The concert defined as the “crème de la crème” or the jewel of the musical odyssey will be on July 17, when Boris and Elena Garlitsky, Öykü Canpolat-Rast, Simone Gramaglia, Konstantin Heidrich and Petar Naydenov will take the stage of the Military Club only to bring Mozart and Bruch together in present tense.

July 18 is a territory reserved for The Next Generation Orchestra, Boris Garlitsky and Konstantin Heidrich with a programme including works by Haydn and Tchaikovsky.

A very playful question – “What did the magpie steal?”, will open the concert on July 19 when Albena Danailova and maestro Nicholás Pasquet will look for the answer with a performance of Giacomo Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” Overture and keep the rhythm with the following Alexander Glazunov’s Violin Concerto in C minor and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdi’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor.

Violinist Lora Markova together with conductors Simon Wenger and Slavil Dimitrov will close the Festival with a programme filled with Vladigerov, Bruch and Beethoven on the final evening – July 20 at Bulgaria Hall.

Tickets for Allegra Festival are now available at: https://www.eventim.bg/bg/artist/festival-alegra-350/profile.html

For more information, follow the official website of the festival www.allegrafestival.com and its social networks Facebook and Instagram

The Allegra Festival and Academy is made possible with the financial support of Ministry of culture Sofia Municipality, the Italian Cultural Institute, under the patronage of the Embassy of Switzerland, and in partnership with the Lyubomir Pipkov National Music School.

(Photo: Provided)

The Sofia Globe is an official media partner of the 2024 Allegra Festival and Academy.