IF YOU failed to catch what was memorably described to me as the "Beethoven Smackdown" on BBC Radio 4's Today programme at the start of the week, I urge you to catch up while it is still available to listen to online. In a spectacularly ill-tempered exchange that put to shame the obfuscation, evasion and equivocation that often characterises interrogation on the Beeb's wireless flagship (usually through no fault of the presenters), two experts from the world of the arts, Dr Simon Maguire, head of musical manuscripts at Sotheby's, and Professor Barry Cooper of Manchester University disagreed over the authenticity of score for Ludwig's Allegretto in B Minor which the auction house was selling, claiming it was in the composer's own hand. To my ears, and confirming my bias, Professor Cooper, a renowned Beethoven musicologist who was educated at Gordonstoun and previously taught at the University of Aberdeen where my colleague Michael Tumelty was just completing his musical studies, was the more abrasively persuasive, and in fact the manuscript – expected to fetch £200,000 – failed to sell, on the same day that Mahler's Resurrection Symphony went for a whopping £4.5m.

I paid particularly close attention to the news item because the matter of making good readable copies of musical masterpieces had been on my mind. These days computers and clever software like Sibelius take the hard labour out of the task, but back then it was often the work of the composer's devoted partner that made sure that the wild scribbles of inspiration became readable, performable music. I can't imagine that Johann Sebastian Bach scribbled wildly, but a new recording of his remarkable Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin by the RSNO's Hungarian assistant leader Tamas Fejes reminded me of the debt he owed to his second wife, Anna Magdalena, who prepared the fair copies of many of his works and was immortalised in the keyboard studies he wrote for her. Those works included the set of six ground-breaking violin pieces which took shape between 1703 and 1720, the year his first wife, Maria Barbara died. As Joanna Wyld suggests in her excellent notes with the Discovery label disc, it seems likely that they were in some measure inspired by and a tribute to his late wife, which makes Anna Magdalena's efforts all the more admirable.

More to the immediate point is the quality of the performance by Tamas Fejes, which should be leaping to the top of every music-lover's list for Santa. These are virtuoso pieces, but there is an almost effortless feel to much of his playing, no matter how many notes require to be played – and they are all there. Unhurried even in the most frantic passages, the slower, less celebrated, sections like the Andante in Sonata No. 2 are absolutely exquisite. Years ago I heard Alexander Janiczek, the former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, play some of these works in the Italian Chapel built by prisoners of war during Orkney's St Magnus Festival, and this beautifully-produced recording was made in Roslin Chapel to the south of Edinburgh. Bach wrote a vast amount of devotional music, but these works are seen as purely musical explorations, yet we seem to love hearing them in the specific calm of religious buildings. I would love to have heard Fejes play them there live, as some lucky schoolchildren did as part of the arrangement he made with the Roslin Chapel Trust, but I will assuredly be in the new RSNO Centre for the second of his album-launch performances on Tuesday evening. No argument.