whoa -Hatto controversy from NYT dig,sousa
February 17, 2007
A Pianist’s Recordings Draw Praise, but Were They All Hers?
By ALAN RIDING
PARIS, Feb. 16 — In the autumn of her life, decades after she had last performed in public, the British pianist Joyce Hatto was rediscovered by a small group of musicians and critics who contended that her recordings of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and others ranked alongside those of the 20th century’s most exceptional virtuosos.
When she died last June at 77, some of those same enthusiasts again proclaimed her to be a neglected genius, in glowing obituaries written for British newspapers. In The Guardian, the music critic Jeremy Nicholas described her as “one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced.â€
Mr. Nicholas and others, it seems, had accepted the explanation for her lack of renown among music lovers: a long battle against cancer had forced her to abandon her concert career in 1976 and led her to devote her energy to recording all the great works in the piano repertory, from Scarlatti to Messiaen, for the small British label Concert Artist.
“Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of,†Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe in 2005.
But now Ms. Hatto’s reputation for excellence and originality has been shaken by a charge of plagiarism. Gramophone, the London music monthly, has presented evidence that several of the recordings issued under her name were in fact copied from recordings of the same music by other pianists.
“We’re only just starting our investigation,†Gramophone’s editor, James Inverne, said in a telephone interview from London on Friday. “Already since we broke the story, people are coming forward expressing doubts about other recordings by Joyce Hatto.â€
In an article posted on the magazine’s Web site (www.gramophone.co.uk), Mr. Inverne said initial doubts about Ms. Hatto’s recordings had been confirmed by a sound engineer, Andrew Rose, who compared the sound waves of her recording of Liszt’s 12 “Transcendental Études†with those of an earlier version by Lazlo Simon. In 10 of the études, the sound waves were identical.
Mr. Rose, who runs Pristine Classical, a small company based near St. Émilion in southwest France, has since created a Web page (pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html) where Liszt recordings by Ms. Hatto can be heard alongside those by Mr. Simon and one by the Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima. Mr. Rose has also concluded that Ms. Hatto’s supposed recording of Godowsky’s studies after Chopin études was in fact the work of Carlo Grante.
The findings have stunned admirers of Ms. Hatto, who in just the last two years have promoted what began to resemble a cult.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Nicholas defended his earlier impression that the CDs credited to Ms. Hatto were “the most extraordinary recordings I have ever heard.â€
He added: “You never ask yourself: ‘Did this person ever go into a studio? Was I being conned?’ She was, after all, someone who had a concert career.â€
Mr. Nicholas said that Ms. Hatto performed in Wigmore Hall in London in the 1960s and made a few records before her retirement from the stage. “I am one of the few people in the music world who actually met her,†he recalled. “But no, I never heard her play.â€
William Barrington-Coupe, Ms. Hatto’s husband and the owner of Concert Artist, which issued more than 100 of her recordings (available online at concertartistrecordings.com), is perhaps the only person who can clear up the mystery. But he could not be reached at his home near Cambridge on Friday and did not respond to telephone or e-mail messages.
Mr. Inverne said that he had spoken to Mr. Barrington-Coupe by telephone on Thursday. “He was very charming,†Mr. Inverne said. “He sounded utterly puzzled. He said he could not explain it and asked to be informed if anyone shed any light on the affair.â€
As it happens, questions about the authenticity of Ms. Hatto’s recordings had for some time been aired in Web chat by music lovers who asked how it was possible for an aged and ailing woman to record so much. They also pointed out that most of Ms. Hatto’s more than 100 CDs were issued over the last 10 years and a number since her death.
These doubts prompted Mr. Nicholas to write a letter to Gramophone last July asking for evidence of possible fraud. “No one came forth,†he said.
Then, this month, Jed Distler, a composer and music critic who was among Ms. Hatto’s admirers, contacted Mr. Inverne with a strange story. When he put the Hatto CD of the Liszt études into his computer, Mr. Inverne recounted, “his iTunes player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording.†Instead, it identified Mr. Simon as the performer.
Looking for scientific evidence of a hoax, Mr. Inverne then sent the Hatto and Simon recordings to Mr. Rose, a former sound engineer for the BBC. Mr. Rose said that the Liszt recordings were easy to identify as those made by Mr. Simon, but that the Nojima recording had been “manipulated†to disguise its origin.
“If all this is true,†Mr. Inverne said, “what strikes me is that this sort of piracy was made possible by technology, and later advances in technology uncovered it.â€
He added: “As far as I know, the classical music world has never known a scandal like this. The art world has, but not classical music.â€
