world music week budapest 2025

World Music Week to be held in Kobuci Garden

Among others, Trio Mandili, Helsinki-Cotonou Ensemble, Besh o droM, Szilvia Bognár, Magyar Bori and Ági Szalóki, Fanfara Complexa, Pál István Szalonna and his Band, Kerekes Band and Mihály Dresch will give concerts at the 7th Óbuda World Music Week, which will take place from June 23 to 29 in Kobuci Garden.

The festival offers special opportunities for the world music scene and the contemporary Hungarian community that is organized around it. This year, the program will also feature musical delicacies, different styles, musical roots and performance methods, as the best of the genre perform them today - the organizers announced to MTI on Thursday.

The world music event series will start with a free outdoor cinema on June 23 at 8 p.m., when the documentary film Szívben még neváká, a joint work by György Szomjas and Béla Halmos, will be screened. The portrait film commemorates János Zerkula, the Gypsy prima of the Csángó from Gyimes, one of the last representatives of classical folk music.

The concert series will be launched on June 24 by the Helsinki-Cotonou Ensemble, a band consisting of Beninese and Finnish members. The collaboration of musicians from the two countries, which are geographically and culturally distant from each other, results in pulsating, cheerful and danceable music. The band is a regular performer at the largest festivals, be it the Montreal Jazz Festival, Sziget or Womex.

On the evening of June 25, the Kerekes Band will celebrate its 30th anniversary, which plants psychedelic melodies on Hungarian folk music foundations. The group has performed at all major Hungarian festivals and concert venues over the past three decades, and they are regularly invited abroad.

The Kobuci Dance House series started sixteen years ago, and the best bands of the Carpathian Basin perform every two weeks. On June 26, Fanfara Complexa and Pál István Szalonna and Banda will perform, and the following day, Besh o droM will give a concert. The band, which mixes Hungarian folk music with Balkan styles, has been entertaining audiences on a world-class level for over 25 years.

On June 28, Trio Mandili, consisting of three young Georgian ladies, will arrive from a remote village in the Caucasus. The girls gained immense popularity on the Internet with the help of social media, becoming world stars in a few weeks after recording their song Apareka with a phone. The video reached millions of views within two weeks, and Trio Mandili is now touring all over the world.

On June 29th, Mihály Dresch, who is celebrating his 70th birthday, will be coming to the closing concert of the World Music Week with his String Quartet. The Kossuth Prize-winning artist is a world-class representative of Hungarian jazz, an indispensable figure in the history of music, and his own special instrument, the fuhun, will once again be heard in the Garden on Sunday evening.

Another event on the closing day is the concert of Szilvia Bognár, Bori Magyar and Ági Szalóki, which was called into being by the common desire to once again experience the joy of singing Hungarian, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, Gypsy, Sephardic Jewish, Portuguese and Spanish melodies together.

Source: MTI.hu

Photo: Kobuci Facebook page

English

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