The solitary violin player

After a grey cold Saturday, the sun came out full force today though temperature was only in the low 20s. Still blinding bright at 7.30 pm! The rock concert revellers in the Gurten hill nearby must be having a field time today, the last day of the local annual rock music festival. They had a very wet, rainy start Friday night and yesterday it drizzled off and on. I woke up at 2 am this morning to go to the bathroom and the music was still blasting away. How unusually sporting of the neighbourhood to allow this!

In the late afternoon I visited the annual 2-day Asian Fair and left after 15 minutes - it was the same old thing I had seen in the last three years, dominated by Thai food stalls (extremely popular I have to admit). And next week a 2-day annual Thai Food Festival, and Chaiyong has invited me for a buffet lunch. The Thais have really stamped their mark here.

I went to the old town for an hour's walk in the pleasantly uncrowded ambiance, which was far from the usual. Almost at the end of the hour I heard beautiful haunting violin music in the air of Schubert's 'Ave Maria', a favourite of mine. The music led me to a solitary young violin player, standing in the empty passage of the Zytglogge tower, where the city's landmark clock was. I dropped a coin in his violin box and took some photos.

When he finished playing I walked on, and that's when he started playing another one of my favourite piece , Cesar Frank's 'Panis Angelicus'.

Barely half a minute later I was engulfed in a large group of some 50 elderly and rather animated Japanese tourists! Well, was I glad they were not around when the young man was playing 'Ave Maria'....