In his album, “Rio Rhythms”, Ahmed El-Salamouny, the specialist for Brazilian guitar music, lets listeners experience the magic of Brazil. The seventeen pieces on the CD are an exciting mixture of Brazilian rhythms delivered in a manner that is at times poetic and dreamy and at times highly virtuosic. For the past ten years, Ahmed El-Salamouny has made Rio de Janeiro his second home. With his confident style and lots of expressiveness, he has created an essence of his experiences in this fascinating city, which he cloaks in an inimitable musical language. The album alternates own compositions with arrangements of known composers, like Tom Jobim, Baden Powell, Luis Bonfá, and Noel Rosa. Ahmed plays with all the accuracy of a classically trained guitar player and with all the passion of the south. One newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, summed it up in two words: “virtuosic magic”.