There is a particular quality to August evenings in Menton. The heat that has pressed down on the town all day begins, slowly, to release its hold; the light turns the colour of old honey against the limestone facades, and the scent of the lemon groves — the town has cultivated them for centuries, and they remain its quiet signature — drifts in from the hillside terraces. It is into this setting that the Festival de Musique de Menton has been placing some of the world's finest musicians for nearly eight decades.
A Festival Built on the Town's Own Stones
The 77th edition of the Festival de Musique de Menton continues on 6 August 2026 with an evening that pairs two instruments rarely heard in conversation at this level: marimba and piano. The concert takes place in the Salon de Grande Bretagne at the Palais de l'Europe, 8 avenue Boyer — a venue that carries its own quiet history, housed within a building that stands as one of the civic anchors of this border town, set between the Italian Riviera and the French coast.
The festival itself is one of the oldest and most consistently distinguished chamber and classical music events on the Riviera. For generations, it has drawn audiences who understand that Menton offers something different from the spectacle of Cannes or the grandeur of Nice: a more considered pace, a town that wears its Mediterranean character without performance.
'Vassilena Serafimova : Marimba — Thomas Enhco : Piano' — the programme note is spare, but the pairing speaks for itself.
Two Artists, One Conversation
Vassilena Serafimova is among the most compelling marimba soloists working in Europe today. Born in Bulgaria, she has built a reputation for bringing the instrument — often confined to the margins of the concert world — into the centre of serious musical discourse. The marimba, with its wooden bars and resonating tubes, produces a sound that sits somewhere between percussion and song: warm, immediate, capable of both rhythmic precision and sustained melodic lines that can fill a room with unexpected tenderness.
Thomas Enhco is a French pianist and composer whose work moves with ease between the classical tradition and jazz, a fluency that has made him a distinctive presence on European stages. The two artists have performed together previously, and what their collaboration produces is less a contest between instruments than a dialogue — each voice shaping the space the other leaves open.
The Salon de Grande Bretagne is an appropriate room for this kind of encounter. It is an intimate setting, not a vast auditorium, and the acoustic relationship between audience and performers is correspondingly close. In a space like this, the attack of a marimba mallet and the decay of a piano chord are not abstract events — they are physical ones, felt as much as heard.
For those travelling to Menton for the festival, the town rewards time taken beyond the concert hall. The Serre de la Madone garden, the old town's baroque churches, the market on the cours Georges Clemenceau in the morning — these are not incidental to a visit but central to understanding why this particular festival, in this particular place, has sustained itself across 77 years. Music sounds different when the town around it has this kind of weight.
Ticket and pricing information is available directly through the festival at festival-musique-menton.fr. The 6 August date sits within the heart of the Riviera summer, when the coast is at its most inhabited — booking ahead is simply practical sense.