There is a particular quality to the light in Menton on August evenings — the kind that lingers long after the sun has dropped behind the Italian hills, turning the old town's ochre facades the colour of cooling embers. The Basilique Saint-Michel sits above all of it, its baroque bell tower visible from the sea, its forecourt one of the most quietly theatrical outdoor stages on the Mediterranean. When a single piano is placed there, and a single pianist walks out to meet it, the effect is almost architectural in its precision.
On 7 August 2026, that pianist will be Alexandre Kantorow. His recital at the Basilique Saint-Michel, Place de l'Église, marks the closing concert — concert de clôture — of the 77th Festival de Musique de Menton, one of the oldest and most respected summer music festivals in France.
A Festival Built on Stone and Sound
The Festival de Musique de Menton has been held every summer since 1950, when the writer and artist Jean Cocteau — who spent formative years on this stretch of coast — helped shape the event's early identity. The basilica's forecourt, with its geometric paving of black and white stone, was never designed as a concert hall, yet it functions as one with startling naturalness. The acoustics are not engineered; they are borrowed from centuries of stone, salt air, and the particular silence that settles over a hillside town after dinner. Audiences sit facing the church's ornate façade, the Ligurian Sea somewhere behind them in the dark.
To be chosen for the closing night of such a festival is, in itself, a statement. Kantorow — born in 1997, the son of violinist Jean-Jacques Kantorow — became the first French pianist to win the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, in 2019. He has since built a reputation not for spectacle but for structural intelligence: the ability to make complex music feel inevitable.
The Programme
The evening's four works form a kind of arc across three centuries of the piano repertoire, each piece chosen, it seems, for its interior weight rather than its surface brilliance.
- J. S. Bach / F. Liszt — Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, S.180**: Liszt's transcription of a Bach cantata chorus — an opening that moves from lamentation toward something closer to resolution.
- N. Medtner — Sonate en fa mineur, op. 5**: A relatively early work by the Russian composer Nikolai Medtner, a figure who stood apart from the modernist currents of his time and whose music rewards the kind of patient, unhurried attention Kantorow brings to it.
- F. Chopin — Prélude, op. 45**: A single prelude — not from the famous set of 24, but a standalone work in C-sharp minor, introspective and searching, lasting barely four minutes. Its placement at the centre of the programme is a deliberate pause.
- L. v. Beethoven — Sonate n°32 en do mineur, op. 111**: The last piano sonata Beethoven ever wrote. Two movements, no more. The first is turbulent and compressed; the second — the Arietta — expands into a series of variations that have been described, not inaccurately, as a farewell to the form itself.
To end a festival with Beethoven's op. 111 is to end it with a question that has no answer — which is perhaps the only honest way to end anything.
The logic of the programme becomes clearer when you consider the occasion. A closing concert asks for music that knows how to conclude. Bach's grief transformed by Liszt's hands; Medtner's solitary voice; a Chopin prelude that arrives and departs like a thought you almost had; and then Beethoven, writing music that seemed to understand it was among the last things he would ever write for the instrument. There is no encore logic here. The evening is designed to end.
Coming to Menton
Menton sits at the very eastern edge of the French Riviera, minutes from the Italian border, and has always felt slightly apart from the festival circuit of Nice and Cannes — quieter, more self-possessed, with a lemon-growing tradition and a town centre that has changed less than its neighbours. The old town climbs steeply from the seafront, and the walk up to the basilica in the early evening, past shuttered shops and the smell of jasmine from courtyard gardens, is part of the experience of the festival itself.
For those planning an evening around the concert, the festival's website — festival-musique-menton.fr — carries ticketing and programme information. Doors to outdoor concerts at the basilica typically open before the performance; arriving early allows time to find a seat with a clear view of both the piano and the church façade, which the stage lighting treats as a backdrop of considerable drama.
The 77th edition of the Festival de Musique de Menton closes, then, with a recital that asks its audience to sit still and listen to one person think through four centuries of music in real time. On a warm August night, in a square above the Mediterranean, that is not a small thing.