The Théâtre Francis Gag sits on Rue de la Croix, a narrow street in the old quarter where the plaster is the colour of dried apricot and the evening air carries something between jasmine and the sea. It is not a grand opera house. It seats a few hundred people at most, and that is precisely the point. When five musicians take the stage here, there is nowhere to hide — no distance between the bow and the listener, no acoustics swallowed by a cavernous vault. The sound lands.
On Friday, 25 September 2026, Ensemble Musicâme France performs at this address from 20h00, presenting a programme of nine works that spans roughly three centuries and at least as many musical traditions. Tickets are priced between 20 and 30 euros.
A Programme Built for the Curious
The evening opens, in spirit if not in strict order, with some of the most recognisable works in the Western canon — Ravel's Boléro, Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Vivaldi's summer storm from The Four Seasons — and then quietly dismantles any expectation of a conventional recital. The programme includes Dimitrie Cantemir's Peşrev Muhayer, a piece of Ottoman classical music from the early eighteenth century, composed by a Moldavian prince who spent years at the Ottoman court and documented its musical traditions with scholarly precision. It is not a curiosity tacked onto a French programme; it is a genuine pivot point, a reminder that the Mediterranean has always been a place of arrival and exchange.
Elsewhere, J. S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor appears in a jazz arrangement credited to Django Reinhardt — a version that asks you to hear a Baroque structure through a different harmonic lens. Franz Doppler's Fantaisie sur des airs valaques brings Romanian folk melody into the flute repertoire. Wieniawski's Scherzo-Tarantelle is a showpiece that demands a particular kind of velocity. Saint-Saëns' Le Cygne, the cello solo from Le Carnaval des animaux, arrives as a moment of stillness in what is otherwise a programme of considerable range.
'Présent dans plus de 100 villes à travers le monde, l'Ensemble Musicâme France défend une musique qui touche le cœur et élève l'esprit au-delà des frontières.'
Five Musicians, One Collective
Ensemble Musicâme France describes itself as a chamber orchestra that operates as a collective — a structure that tends to produce a particular kind of attentiveness on stage. The five performers here are Issam Garfi on flute, Sibylle Cornaton Duchesne as solo violin, Mislava Mikelić on second violin, François Duchesne on viola, and Noé Natorp on cello. The ensemble draws its members from international and local backgrounds, from large orchestral formations, and the programme they have assembled reflects that breadth: it is not organised around a single period or a single national tradition, but around the idea that these works can speak to each other across the distances of time and geography.
Nice, for its part, has always been a city that absorbs influences without entirely losing its own character. The old town — the Vieux-Nice where the Théâtre Francis Gag stands — was Piedmontese before it was French, and before that it was Ligurian and Genoese and Roman. The street grid is Italian in its logic, the baroque churches are painted in colours that belong to no single tradition, and the socca sold in the market nearby is made from chickpea flour that arrived here from North Africa centuries ago. A programme that moves from Vivaldi to Cantemir to Reinhardt is, in that sense, entirely at home in this quarter.
What a visitor can expect on the evening itself: a room that is intimate enough to notice the physical effort of the playing, a repertoire that rewards both the listener who knows every note of Boléro and the one who has never encountered Ottoman makam, and an ensemble that has performed this kind of cross-cultural programme in more than a hundred cities worldwide. The Théâtre Francis Gag is a ten-minute walk from the Promenade des Anglais, and the streets of Vieux-Nice in late September are still warm after dark.
Some evenings in a city stay with you not because they were spectacular but because they were precisely right — the scale, the programme, the room, the hour. This one has the makings of that.