BABRA

How does Hungary sound? Babra’s music condensate the History of the peoples that have crossed their land: a nation with one thousand years of History and a culture unique in their geographic surrounding, a filigree of elements of East and West, that the band from Budapest unravels with their voices and instruments.

The Hungarian music drinks from the pagan culture coming from the steppes of Eurasia, from Byzantium and the Ottomans, from its neighbors, the southern Slavic peoples, from the gypsies, the main minority present in the country, and, at the same time, from the Western influences of the Christian peoples, religion that the first Hungarian king, István, would embrace. With a language of unique origin in its geographical environment, related to Finnish and Estonian, in Hungary there has been a breeding ground for the generation of an artistic corpus and an own conscience that would maintain their culture and identity despite oppression of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Soviet regime.

With these brushstrokes we can glimpse the diverse layers that the current folk music of the country encompasses, a bewitching music with Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály felt in love, and that Babra provides us in its best contemporary expression.