The best-known cellist in the world, Yo-Yo Ma is associated with a cello known as the Davydov Stradivarius, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1712. It was bought for Jacqueline de Pré in 1964 for $90,000, but - heretically - she didn't like it, and often complained about its unpredictability.

Yo-Yo Ma later noted that "Jackie's unbridled dark qualities went against the Davydov. You have to coax the instrument. The more you attack it, the less it returns." Ma is himself something of a heretic, of course, having championed the use of electronic wizardry to take the cello into the 21st century.

Steven Isserlis plays most of his concerts on the De Munck Stradivarius of 1730, made when the master luthier was a whopping 86 years old. It's owned by the Nippon Music Foundation of Japan and has been described by Isserlis as his "dream cello . . . it has everything".

He can't, however, afford to own it, so he shares a 1745 Guadagnini cello with David Waterman of the Endellion Quartet; he is also, with the help of a bank loan and copious investors, in the process of buying a Montagnana cello from 1740.

Steven Isserlis will direct the Irish Chamber Orchestra and play the solo part in Haydn's cello concerto in D, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Wednesday, February 13th.

The man who has been called the greatest cellist of all time, Mstislav Rostropovich, owned and played the 1711 Duport Stradivarius from 1974 to 2007. It was named after a French cellist who reportedly allowed Napoleon Bonaparte to have a go on it in 1812. A dent on the instrument is said to have resulted from the emperor's rough handling while straddling the cello with his boots.

Since Rostropovich's death the Duport cello appears to have vanished off the musical radar.