The first reason is that I don’t have the money to buy another instrument that is as good! The second is that I love it, although it is not the best violin in the world. As I get older I believe that if the instrument is more or less right in the historical context, it doesn’t have to be from the same era and the same city as the music. That’s nonsense. It’s a subjective thing, but if you feel a certain harmony with the instrument and that it is suited to the music, I think that’s sufficient. It’s far more important to play well than to have an instrument that is ideal for the music. I prefer a good pianist playing Bach on a Steinway to a mediocre player performing on a beautiful harpsichord.

That suggests that you approach something like the Bach solo violin pieces from a purely musical angle, without delving into the historical background?

Yes, but having played all this French orchestral music and so on, I do feel in my bones what a gavotte, a minuet or a bourée is. After playing Lully and Rameau, you don’t play the Bach solo sonatas as abstract music. A minuet in a solo violin partita is still a minuet and although the Chaconne of the D minor Partita was never danced, it is not just a series of variations that you can interpret as if they were some deep and profound abstract statement to be performed with total freedom. To me, that’s rubbish.

I would agree, and also believe that one of the things that undermined the dance element that is always present in Baroque music is the pseudo-mysticism that developed around Bach’s music in the 19th century.

I must confess, though, that I increasingly understand how these romantic ideas came to develop.

Tell me

Because there is something mysterious about Bach, just as there is about Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart, or the late Beethoven string quartets. There is a certain point where faced by pieces of art, you say “My God, where is this coming from.” And from there the Romantics invented the mysticism they applied to Bach, the aura of the “holy Bach”. And there’s nothing wrong with that, except it was overdone.

But it has surely damaged complete understanding of Bach by creating a false image of this terribly devout, serious figure that never smiles. Take the third of the solo violin Partitas, the one in E, which is a marvellously extrovert work full of joyous, dancing music.