The Bohemian composer Franz Benda (1709-86) started his musical career as a boy soprano in the Benedictine church of St Nicholas in Prague and the Dresden Hofkapelle but from 1733 until the end of his long life he worked as a violinist for the Prussian Crown Prince (later Frederick the Great). The 18th-century Sturm und Drang poet Schubart remarked that the sound Benda ‘drew from his violin was the echo of a silver bell’, and praised his playing as lush, profound and incisive. Readers might confuse him with his younger brother Georg, who was the pioneer of melodrama – the form of spoken accompanied recitative that fascinated Mozart briefly at around the time of Zaide (1778).

Three illustrious graduates of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis perform four violin sonatas (and an additional extract from another) from a unique manuscript in which additional staves in all movements contain fully written-out ornamented versions of the violin part (c1760). Albeit not in Benda’s hand, this remarkably rare resource provides a valuable way to understand the style and substance of his own practice of embellishments. He was renowned for emotionally moving cantabile playing of adagios, so it is no surprise that these movements produce memorable results here: Leila Schayegh plays her Guarneri violin (Cremona, 1675) with an astonishing mastery over technical execution that never eclipses sincere feeling. Continuo support from Felix Knecht and Václav Luks is alert or thoughtful according to the demands of the musical mood; in two sonatas Luks plays a copy of a Cristofori fortepiano, a decision that reaps dividends in the spellbinding Adagio that begins Sonata XIII in C minor and the pulsating Allegro that opens Sonata XXXII in E major. The booklet contains a facsimile page of the Adagio poco andante from Sonata VII in A major; it exhibits the virtues of both the present-day violinist and her 18th-century predecessor. Maybe Glossa or the Schola Cantorum could have put the scores online for intrepid students of historical performance practice.