There is a particular quality to summer nights in Menton that resists easy description. The air carries salt and the faint sweetness of the lemon groves for which the town is famous; the Ligurian hills hold the heat long after the sun has dropped behind them. And when the lights come up on the Parvis de la Basilique Saint-Michel — that improbable baroque stage set balanced between the old town and the sea — the effect is less a concert venue than a theatre in which the architecture itself performs.
This is the setting, every August for more than seven decades, for the Festival de Musique de Menton. On 28 July 2026, the festival returns to the basilica square for its 77th edition with a programme that pairs two distinctive voices: mezzo-soprano Neïma Naouri and tenor Pablo Campos share the stage with The Amazing Keystone Big Band for an evening dedicated to the music of George Gershwin.
Brass, Voice and a Square That Was Made for This
The Amazing Keystone Big Band is among the most consistently inventive large ensembles working in French jazz today. Formed in Paris, the group has built a reputation for programmes that treat the big-band idiom seriously — not as nostalgia, but as a living architecture for ambitious repertoire. Gershwin sits naturally in their hands: his songs and orchestrations were themselves conceived for large forces, for voices that could cut through brass and reed sections without losing intimacy. The combination of two classically trained soloists with a jazz ensemble of this size is precisely the kind of collision Gershwin himself orchestrated throughout his career, moving between Carnegie Hall and Broadway with an ease that still unsettles tidy genre distinctions.
Gershwin once said he had no time for the gap between serious and popular music — the Parvis de Saint-Michel, with its cobblestones and its frescoed facade, seems constitutionally unable to enforce one either.
Neïma Naouri has performed across European opera and concert stages; Pablo Campos brings a lyric tenor sensibility to material that rewards both operatic weight and the looser phrasing of the American songbook. Together, and against the backdrop of one of the most photographed squares on the Côte d'Azur, the evening promises the kind of programme that takes full advantage of an outdoor venue without condescending to it.
The Basilica Square as a Stage
The Basilique Saint-Michel Archange dates from the seventeenth century and dominates the old town of Menton from its elevated position above the port. The square in front of it — the Parvis de l'Église — is paved in a geometric pattern of dark and light stone, framed by pastel facades that glow amber under stage lighting. It seats an audience in the open air with the basilica's twin towers rising behind the performers and, on clear nights, the Mediterranean visible beyond the rooftops below.
The Festival de Musique de Menton has used this space since 1950, when the writer and artist Jean Cocteau — who had a deep and well-documented connection to the town — helped establish the event. That founding instinct, to bring serious music into a public square rather than a concert hall, has remained the festival's defining characteristic. The programme across each summer season typically spans chamber music, orchestral work, and vocal concerts, drawing performers of international standing to what is, in architectural terms, one of the most remarkable stages in Europe.
For the 28 July concert, the doors and ticketing details are available through the festival's official site at festival-musique-menton.fr. Menton is the last French town before the Italian border, reachable by train along the coast from Nice in under an hour — which makes an evening here easy to combine with time elsewhere on the Riviera, or equally easy to make the sole reason for the journey.