There is a particular quality to a Mediterranean evening in late June — the light thickening to amber, the sea still holding the warmth of the afternoon, the air carrying salt and jasmine in roughly equal measure. On the Esplanade Francis Palmero in Menton, that atmosphere arrives each year with an extra charge: the town is about to become, once again, a stage.
The 77th Festival de Musique de Menton opens on 21 June 2026 not with a headliner or a grand overture, but with something considerably more affecting. The event known as 'Le Before — Sing'in' places the esplanade in the hands of the region's young singers: choral ensembles from the collèges de Maurois, de Vento, de la Villa Blanche and de Saint Joseph, alongside choristers from the lycées Paul Valéry and Saint Joseph, and students from the Conservatoire de Menton itself.
A Town That Has Always Listened
Menton occupies the easternmost corner of the French Riviera, pressed between the Maritime Alps and the Italian border. It is a town that has spent centuries at the intersection of cultures — Ligurian, Grimaldi, French — and its festival reflects that layered sensibility. Founded in 1950, the Festival de Musique de Menton built its reputation on open-air classical concerts held in the parvis of the Basilique Saint-Michel Archange, one of the finest Baroque facades on the Côte d'Azur. Over seven decades it has welcomed orchestras and soloists of international standing. Le Before, by contrast, is a local affair — and deliberately so.
'Sing'in' is the festival's way of reminding itself where music actually begins: in school corridors, in rehearsal rooms, in the unsteady but earnest voices of teenagers.
The artistic direction for the evening falls to Paul Smith, who conducts the assembled choral forces. The programme brings together two further performers whose profiles speak to a deliberately broad musical palette: Daniela Mars, appearing as both flautist and vocalist, and Faya Braz, a beatboxer whose presence suggests the evening will not be confined to any single tradition. Vocalists Eliette Prévot and Lydia Wonham complete the performing ensemble, adding further layers to what promises to be a genuinely mixed programme.
What the Esplanade Offers
The Esplanade Francis Palmero is an open civic space — practical, generous in scale, without the architectural grandeur of the basilica parvis. That is, in a sense, the point. Le Before is a curtain-raiser that belongs to the town rather than to the festival's more formal programme. Families arrive early. Locals who might not attend a classical recital find themselves standing at the edge of a crowd, listening.
For a visitor arriving in Menton on the first evening of summer — 21 June is the Fête de la Musique across France, a national celebration of music in public spaces — the timing carries its own logic. The whole country opens its streets to performance on that date, and Menton chooses to do so with its own students at the centre.
The combination of choral singing, flute, beatbox and solo voices does not suggest a programme built around a single repertoire. It suggests, instead, an evening comfortable with contrast — the kind that holds a crowd's attention not through spectacle but through the simple fact of live voices in open air, competing gently with the sound of the sea a short distance away.
Admission details are not published in advance; the festival's website at festival-musique-menton.fr carries current information as the date approaches. What is certain is the date, the place, and the people performing. In a town that has spent 77 years refining the art of listening, that is usually enough to draw a crowd worth joining.