Budapest Ritmo 2016

This first edition takes place in the MüPA, with a great variety of international artists who make music rich in rhythms and varied in their nationalities. Great musicians, wonderful bands, a lot of mix and fusion, a real pleasure to enjoy such quality!

The concerts take place inside the Palace of Arts and in an external tent in the parking area located side by side the Danube. A festival very well organized, during three days you can listen a variety of bands and artists that few European capitals can brag about having so much at such a good price.

With a lot of curiosity I enjoy what are playing these bands, so distant in cultures and so united in music, a true delight for the ear. I greatly surprised by Noura Mint Seymali, from Mauritania, for her strength and delicacy at the same time in everything they do, beauty in her voice, in the touch of the instruments, in themselves (photos 2,3,4,5) Another surprise is Mames Babegenush, from Denmark (photos 1,6,7,8,9) a band as nice as creative in the way they communicate on stage.

From place to place, while I walk around the festival from concert to concert, I feel that imagination is not absent in Budapest Ritmo and I like that feeling a lot. I have no doubt that the idea of the festival has been a cultural success for the city of Budapest that needed something like this since the beginning of the 21st century and nobody had dared to do it, due to lack of resources or perhaps because of lack of imagination.

At a pause, drinking a beer, talking to another lover of World Music, tells me that this first edition of Budapest Ritmo comes hand by hand from the WOrld Music EXpo, WOMEX, which in 2015 opened for the first time the great gate of World Music in a capital of Eastern Europe. They are like brothers, he tells me, now we have our own festival and that makes me very happy … to me too, I said, to me also my friend.

Photos & Report by OTo