Why is virtuoso playing such a focus here?

[hardy_practice]

Surely!  The Early Music shop usually have a clavichord or two they're selling on commision and the British Clavichord Society have private ads in their journal.  If you're really keen though I'd save up £8000 and get Peter Bavington to make you one - he's the bee's knee's in the clavichord world.  Also the Yahoo clavichord group is worth joining - some people make their own.

[awesom_o]

Don't think I'll be in the market for an 8 thousand quid clavichord any time soon

But I'd certainly love to find one on the 300-400 end of the price spectrum, even if it were a bit of a fixer-upper....

[chrisbutch]

These people have an auction 4 times a year and tend to have at least one Morley clavichord that goes for £300.  Morley themselves sell them for over £4000.  They're not very good (far too quiet)

I've had  a Morley clavichord for nearly 40 years. I don't find the low dynamic level is a disadvantage - quite the contrary, in fact. Your ears need time - about 10 minutes or so, I find - to adjust, in exactly the same way as your eyes take time to adjust to the low light in a dark room. But after that you come to discern a remarkably wide range of dynamic level. Among other things, this is valuably instructive when returning to the piano, since you come to recognise that the relative is much more important than the absolute in performing dynamics. You do need to be in a very quiet environment though - you become acutely sensitive to the slightest ambient sound.

True, the Morley is rather cheaply built compared with some of the beautiful modern craftsman-built instruments: but with such a simple action, this is far less important than it would be with a piano. If you do get a Morley, it's worth looking out for the 'CPE Bach' model, which has a 63-note compass up to top g. This is necessary for CPE Bach's own works, which are really the core of the clavichord repertoire.

Incidentally, most Haydn sonatas, other than a few late ones, also work remarkably well on the clavichord. Not really surprising - most of them had already been written by the time CPE Bach died, and many of them before the completion of CPE's standard treatise on keyboard (actually mainly clavichord) technique. It's likely that in their early years the Haydn sonatas were played just as frequently on clavichords as on early pianos - perhaps more so, since there were more clavichords around. They dont, however, work too well on the harpsichord.

Apologies for drifting yet further off topic...

[hardy_practice]

Hey, nice to hear from you!  Here's a Morley Bach model (up to D) playing some CPE:

And at about £4000 new I wouldn't say cheap!

[chrisbutch]

Mine, bought c. 1976, was about £500 new, as I remember. Heigh-ho....

[hardy_practice]

I was about to buy a used one about ten years ago - Morley wanted about £2500.  I found one at the Early Music store for £750.