Budai Sándor

Budai Sándor, a primás (lead violinist) and violinist, was born in Budapest in 1965 into a family of musicians. He began playing the violin at the age of six and was admitted to the legendary Rajkó Ensemble in 1975, where he received training in classical, salon and Hungarian Gypsy music. His teachers included Gyula Farkas, Oszkár Losonczy-Sweitzer and Béla Székelyhidi.

Thanks to his exceptional talent, he became one of the Rajkó Ensemble’s lead violinists at the age of sixteen. As a young musician, he toured the world with the ensemble and performed at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, La Scala in Milan and the Sydney Opera House.

From 1985, he was a member of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble and later founded his own orchestra. During his career, he also worked abroad for extended periods and subsequently appeared on numerous European stages as a performer in André Heller’s large-scale Magneten Gipsy Show.

For many years, he performed alongside the world-renowned cimbalom player Kálmán Balogh in the Balogh Kálmán Gipsy Cimbalom Band, contributing to numerous concerts and recordings. A versatile musician, he is equally at home in traditional Hungarian Gypsy music, classical music, folk music and various forms of world music.

Throughout a career spanning several decades, Budai Sándor has remained a distinguished representative of Hungarian Gypsy music and the primás tradition.