A violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1684, known as the Ex-Croall; McEwen, will be offered for sale by auctioneers Ingles & Hayday in London on March 28, 2017. But before you get your credit card out, be advised that the instrument, which has a back crafted from a single piece of maple and has appeared on numerous famous recordings, has a guide price from £1.3 to £2 million.

In the video below, Samuel Staples demonstrates the rich tonal variety of the instrument by playing the first movement of Bach's Violin Sonata No 1, BWV1001, and, interestingly, Bach was born the year after the violin was made:

This violin was played by Frank Peter Zimmerman from 1985 to 1990 and featured on several of Zimmerman's EMI recordings, including the Paganini Caprices (1985), Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with the Berlin RSO and Gerd Albrecht, Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra and Jeffrey Tate, and the Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Lorin Maazel.