The University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Music is hosting concert today that will feature the university’s collection of Amati instruments. It is one of the only complete Amati quartets in the world.

USask describes the instruments as hand-crafted priceless pieces of history spanning more than 400 years.

It is an intimate affair taking place at the Diefenbaker Canada Centre this morning and will feature a violin smuggled out of France for safekeeping during the Second World War and another once owned by a world-famous musician, to an extremely rare viola commissioned by Pope Paul the Fifth, and a cello lost in time for decades in a dusty attic in the Earl of Plymouth’s castle in England.