There is something quietly perverse — and quietly perfect — about staging Schubert's Winterreise on the Côte d'Azur in late June. Outside the Hippodrome de la Côte d'Azur, the bougainvillea will be at full throttle, the air thick with jasmine and the residual heat of a Mediterranean day. Inside, a baritone and a pianist will begin their walk through frozen landscapes, frozen grief, frozen time.
This is the particular alchemy that Les Nocturnes du Piano has built its reputation on: placing serious music in a setting that refuses to be solemn. The festival, held at 2 boulevard JF Kennedy in Cagnes-sur-Mer, draws its character from the tension between the grandeur of the repertoire and the ease of the Riviera evening. You arrive with the smell of the sea still on your skin. Then the music starts, and the geography shifts entirely.
The Work
Franz Schubert composed Winterreise — The Winter Journey — in 1827, the year before his death, setting twenty-four poems by Wilhelm Müller. The cycle follows an unnamed wanderer who leaves behind a lost love and moves through a winter landscape that grows progressively more interior, more hallucinatory. It is one of the most sustained explorations of loneliness in the Western canon, and one of the most technically and emotionally demanding works a baritone and pianist can undertake together.
The soirée spéciale on 28 June 2026 brings together baritone Samuel Hasselhorn and pianist Philippe Bianconi for the complete cycle. Hasselhorn, a German-French baritone, has established himself as one of the most searching interpreters of the German Lieder repertoire; Bianconi, a French pianist of long standing and considerable distinction, brings to the partnership a particular sensitivity to the interior life of the score. The piano in Winterreise is not accompaniment in any subordinate sense — it carries the cold, the trudging footsteps, the turning weathervane, the frozen river. What these two artists make of that dialogue is the event.
The Place
Cagnes-sur-Mer sits between Nice and Antibes, a town of three distinct layers: the modern seafront, the hillside village of Haut-de-Cagnes with its medieval castle, and the quiet residential quarter where Renoir spent his final years. The Hippodrome de la Côte d'Azur occupies the flat land near the coast — a working racecourse for much of the year, transformed for the festival into something altogether different. The scale of the venue gives the nocturnal concerts a particular quality: the sky is present, the air moves, the setting has none of the sealed-off hush of a concert hall.
That openness suits Winterreise in unexpected ways. Müller's wanderer is always outside, always exposed. The poem 'Der Leiermann' — 'The Hurdy-Gurdy Man' — ends the cycle with a figure standing barefoot on the ice, playing to no one. Heard under a darkening Riviera sky, that image lands differently than it does in any carpeted auditorium.
Tickets are available online through the festival's website at lesnocturnesdupiano.com. Pricing details had not been confirmed at the time of publication.
'Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh ich wieder aus' — A stranger I arrived, a stranger I depart. The opening line of the cycle, and as good a description of the traveller's condition as literature offers.
For those making the journey from Nice or Cannes, Cagnes-sur-Mer is twenty minutes by train, and the coastal road at dusk — the light going bronze over the Baie des Anges — is reason enough to arrive early. Book a table somewhere along the front, let the evening settle, and then walk to the Hippodrome with time to spare. The music will take you somewhere much colder. That, precisely, is the point.