The Salon de Grande Bretagne sits inside the Palais de l'Europe with the quiet authority of a room that has heard a great deal of music and forgotten none of it. Chandeliers, pale walls, the faint salt drift from the sea a few streets away. On the evening of 26 July 2026, the 77th Festival de Musique de Menton brings Duo Jatekok — Adélaïde Panaget and Naïri Badal — to this intimate hall for a programme they have titled, without ambiguity, Sorcellerie.
Sorcery. It is a word that commits you to something.
Four Works, One Dark Thread
The programme follows a logic that is almost theatrical. It opens with Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain — the sabbath scene, the witches' gathering, music that was left unfinished by its composer and completed by Rimsky-Korsakov, though Duo Jatekok perform it here in the four-hand piano version that restores something rawer and stranger than the orchestral arrangement most audiences know. Saint-Saëns follows with his Danse macabre, op. 40, the violin's tuning dropped a semitone to suggest the devil's fiddle, the scythe's rhythm tapped out in the bass — except that here, again, it is two pianists rather than an orchestra, and proximity changes everything. Then comes Dukas's L'apprenti sorcier, a piece so thoroughly colonised by a certain animated film that hearing it live, stripped back to keys and hammers and two pairs of hands, is a mild act of reclamation.
The programme closes with something of a different weight entirely: Liszt's Sonata in B minor, S. 178, in the transcription made by Saint-Saëns himself. The Liszt B minor Sonata is one of the defining monuments of the Romantic piano repertoire — a single continuous movement lasting roughly thirty minutes, structurally audacious, emotionally exhausting in the best sense. That Saint-Saëns chose to arrange it for two pianos is itself a curious historical fact, a gesture of admiration from one formidable musical mind toward another. In Duo Jatekok's hands, the sonata becomes a conversation rather than a monologue.
'Jatekok' means 'games' in Hungarian — a name that carries both lightness and the suggestion of rules being played with.
The Festival, the Town, the Tradition
The Festival de Musique de Menton has been running since 1950, which makes the 77th edition something of a landmark in quiet accumulation. The festival's signature venue is the open-air forecourt of the Basilica of Saint-Michel Archange, where concerts take place against a backdrop of the old town's ochre and terracotta façades, the sea visible beyond. But the Salon de Grande Bretagne offers a different proposition: covered, contained, the acoustics immediate, the distance between performer and listener measured in metres rather than rows.
Menton itself occupies the easternmost point of the French Riviera, pressed against the Italian border, its microclimate famously mild enough to have sustained lemon groves for centuries. The town has always attracted artists drawn to that particular quality of light — too warm to be quite French, too composed to be quite Italian. In late July, the evenings cool slowly, and the walk from almost anywhere in the old town to the Palais de l'Europe takes less than ten minutes.
Duo Jatekok — Adélaïde Panaget and Naïri Badal — have built their reputation on exactly this kind of curated, thematically coherent programming, bringing to two-piano repertoire a rigour that treats the format as a serious artistic choice rather than a novelty. A programme called Sorcellerie is not an accident of scheduling; it is an argument about what these four pieces share, and what two instruments, played simultaneously by two musicians who have presumably spent years learning to think together, can reveal that a single pianist cannot.
The Palais de l'Europe is at 8 avenue Boyer. Further details and the full festival programme are available at the festival's official site. For a town that has been hosting serious music against an implausibly beautiful backdrop for more than seven decades, one more evening of sorcery seems entirely in keeping.