Prince Esterházy's baryton and Beethoven's violoncellists Early Music Days

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Behind the neck of the baryton runs a second bank of metal strings that the player plucks with the left thumb while bowing the gut strings in front — an instrument so awkward that almost no one wrote for it, except the Kapellmeister whose prince happened to love playing it. On 19 November Christophe Coin brings that instrument to the Alternative Stage of the Greek National Opera.

Coin is one of the figures who rebuilt how this repertoire is played — a cellist and viola da gamba player at the centre of the historically informed movement for four decades, founder of the Quatuor Mosaïques and the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges. He is joined by the violist Miguel da Silva and the cellist Dimos Gountaroulis, who curates this strand of the programme. The three play the music Joseph Haydn wrote for Prince Nikolaus Esterházy — who played the baryton himself — the trios Haydn produced between 1765 and 1775, when his day job was supplying his employer with music for an instrument only his employer wanted to hear.

The audience is the early-music crowd that travels for a name like Coin's — period-instrument players, viol and cello students, and listeners who would rather hear one rare instrument done right than a familiar programme done again.

The evening pairs Haydn's Esterházy trios with music by the cellist-composers who orbited Beethoven a generation later — Anton Kraft, Jean-Louis Duport and Bernhard Romberg, virtuosos who wrote for their own hands. You hear the baryton's doubled strings ring against viola and cello in the Haydn, then the writing turns toward the bolder, more soloistic cello language of the years around Beethoven. It is chamber repertoire that rarely leaves the specialist archives, played by people who live in it.

If you want the big Romantic cello concertos, this is the quieter room next door. But if the idea of hearing a prince's private instrument revived by one of its few living masters is the draw, this is the rare night to do it.

The SNFCC (ΚΠΙΣΝ) sits on the Kallithea coast, reached by free shuttle from central Athens, by tram or by bus rather than the metro. Doors at 20:30, part of the Early Music Days in the Alternative Stage's tenth-anniversary season. Tickets 12 or 15 EUR, 10 for students and children.

An instrument written for one man in the 1770s, back on a public stage for one night in the hands of Christophe Coin.