There is a particular quality to summer evenings in Menton that resists easy description. The light does not so much fade as deepen — turning the ochre and terracotta of the old town into something closer to amber, while the sea below the Esplanade des Sablettes holds the last warmth of the day long after the sun has gone. It is into this setting, on 24 July 2026, that Ensemble Spark will walk out for the pre-opening concert of the 77th Festival de Musique de Menton.
The Esplanade des Sablettes is one of the more quietly theatrical outdoor stages on the Côte d'Azur. Positioned at the foot of the old town, with the Ligurian coastline stretching east toward the Italian border, it asks nothing of its audience except attention — the architecture of the place does the rest. On a still evening, the acoustics are generous, the kind that reward chamber music in particular.
Ensemble Spark and the Logic of a Pre-Opening
The pre-opening concert is a tradition that functions as both prologue and promise. It sets a register — something more intimate than the grand gestures of an opening night — and Ensemble Spark, billed as 'The Classical Band', is well-suited to that role. The ensemble brings together Andrea Ritter on recorder, Daniel Koschitzki on recorder and melodica, Stefan Balazsovics on violin and viola, and Isabel García Castro on cello. Joining them is pianist Christian Fritz.
The combination is worth pausing over. The recorder — the flûte à bec — is an instrument that carries a long history in early and baroque music, yet in contemporary chamber settings it can sound startlingly fresh: bright, direct, occasionally reedy in the best sense. Paired with the melodica, an instrument that occupies a curious middle ground between keyboard and wind, and set against the warmer resonances of strings and piano, the ensemble's palette is genuinely unusual. Ensemble Spark has built a reputation for programming that moves fluidly across periods and styles, treating the classical repertoire not as a museum but as a living conversation.
A Festival Entering Its Eighth Decade
The Festival de Musique de Menton has been running since 1950, which makes it one of the longest-established summer music festivals in France. Its founding coincided with the postwar reopening of European cultural life, and over the decades it has drawn artists of considerable stature to this easternmost corner of the French Riviera. The festival's signature venue — the parvis of the Basilique Saint-Michel Archange, with its baroque façade rising behind the stage — has become one of the most photographed concert settings in the Mediterranean world.
But the pre-opening concert at the Sablettes has its own logic. It belongs to the town rather than to the festival's grander ceremonial spaces. Menton is a city that rewards those who arrive early and walk slowly: the covered market in the old town, the lemon groves that give the city its particular civic identity, the Musée Jean Cocteau on the seafront. A concert here, the evening before the official programme begins, feels like a local secret offered to anyone paying close enough attention.
For those travelling from Nice or Monaco — both under an hour by train along the corniche — arriving on the 24th for the pre-opening and staying into the main festival makes obvious sense. The French-Italian border is minutes away, and Menton itself sits in that pleasantly ambiguous zone where the Riviera shades into Liguria: the cooking changes, the accents soften, the pace slows further.
'The pre-opening belongs to the town rather than to the festival's grander ceremonial spaces — a local secret offered to anyone paying close enough attention.'
Ticket and pricing information is available directly through the festival's official site at festival-musique-menton.fr. Given the Sablettes' open-air format and the intimacy of a chamber ensemble, this is an evening that rewards arriving unhurried, perhaps with time beforehand for a walk along the promenade as the light begins its slow descent into the sea.