JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

Published on More Intelligent Life (http://www.moreintelligentlife.com)

Home > JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE

Rod Williams investigates the biggest fraud in the history of recorded

music--the story of how the husband of a dying British classical pianist
fooled the critical establishment into acclaiming his wife, Joyce Hatto, as a
genius ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007; with a postscript
In January 2003 the Yahoo! great-pianists group posted an MP3 file of Liszts Mephisto
Waltz played by a little-known English pianist called Joyce Hatto. The web forum put up only
a 30-second extract. Even so, the groups pianophiles, who obsessively compare notes on
classical recordings, were captivated--and not only by the playing, but also by the player.
Joyce Hatto had retired from the concert platform in 1976, but a quarter of a century later, in
her 70s and suffering from terminal cancer, she had toiled in the recording studio in an
amazing burst of creative energy. Her discography was remarkable both for its size--at 103
discs, her output made her probably the most prolific pianist in history--but also for the
matchless range of her repertoire. She had mastered the complete sonata cycles of
Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Prokofiev; concertos by Tchaikovsky, Brahms and
Mendelssohn; and all 53 of Godowskys transcriptions of the Chopin Etudes, the most
impossibly difficult pieces ever written for the piano.
Word of this achievement soon spread beyond the web. The recordings--issued by Concert
Artists, a small label based in Royston, 35 miles (56km) north of London--began to win highly
complimentary reviews from the music press. By August 2005 her story had reached the rest
of the media: Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever
heard of, began Richard Dyer in a profile for the Boston Globe.

1 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

Hattos husband, a recording engineer and producer called William Barrington-Coupe,

explained what made her performances so powerful. She doesnt want to play in public
again, he told Dyer, because she never knows when the pain will start, or when it will stop,
and she refuses to take drugs. Nothing has stopped her and I believe the illness has added a
third dimension to her playing: she gets at what is inside the music, what lies behind it.
As Hatto struggled to the studio to lay down yet more recordings in the time left to her--she
performed Beethovens Les Adieux Sonata from a wheelchair just three weeks before she
died--critics joined a stampede to celebrate this triumph of art over adversity, of hidden talent
finally recognised.
I have no hesitation in saying that Joyce Hatto is one of the greatest pianists I have ever
heard, began Jeremy Nicholas in a eulogy for Gramophone. If you want to experience a
perfect assimilation of virtuosity and musicality, then she comes close to faultless. Critics
across the world compared her to legendary artists such as Claudio Arrau, Dinu Lipatti and
Sviatoslav Richter. By the time of her death in June 2006, she was, in the words of Jed
Distler, one of the greatest, most consistently satisfying pianists in history.
But in February this year, when Distler loaded Hattos CD of Liszts Transcendental Studies
into his computer, he noticed something peculiar. The iTunes database recognised the disc as
a recording by the Hungarian pianist, Laszlo Simon. Gramophone asked Andrew Rose, an
audio expert, to investigate and by comparing the waveforms of the two recordings he could
see instantly that ten out of 12 tracks were identical to Simons performances. Rose then
discovered that Hattos version of the fifth Liszt study, Feux Follets, was indistinguishable
from a recording by a Japanese pianist called Minoru Nojima. What is more, the performance
had been speeded up, but digitally manipulated to remain at the same pitch. That rang alarm
bells, Rose told me. When you speed up recordings, you change the pitch--unless you have
set out deliberately to mislead.
With this evidence, Gramophone broke the story in mid-February and within a week the
sources for some 20 of Hattos CDs had been found. Her much-admired Mozart sonatas
turned out to be those of the Austrian pianist Ingrid Haebler; her Chopin/Godowsky Etudes
were versions by Marc-Andr Hamelin and Carlo Grante; her Brahms Piano Concerto No 2,
which had been issued under the baton of Ren Khler with the National Philharmonic
Symphony Orchestra was actually Vladimir Ashkenazy and Bernhard Haitink with the Vienna
Philharmonic. So far, recordings by 66 pianists have been identified and the number keeps
rising by the week. It was the biggest fraud in the history of recorded music.
The first Joyce Hatto CD I ever heard was her Beethoven Appassionata sonata--a recording
that turned out to be by the Irish pianist John O'Conor. It seemed to me to be a
well-mannered, straight, slightly impersonal rendition of the text; a pale shadow of Emil Gilels,
Daniel Barenboim or many others at their best. But as I listened to the recording, knowing it
was a fake, what tantalised me was whether it would have sounded the same to me six
months ago, with the image of Hattos tragically uplifting story in my mind.
As I discovered more about the fraud my questions proliferated. What was Hatto really like as
a performer? Were the 66 plundered pianists in fact a collection of under-recognised
talents--the greatest pianists nobody had ever heard of? Above all, what did the whole
critical fiasco mean for the art of performance? The list of those who had been duped was
formidable and included Bryce Morrison, Gramophones senior piano critic and Tom Deacon,
the executive producer of PhilipsGreat Pianists of the 20th Century. Ivan Davis, a student of
Vladimir Horowitz, had declared: I know of no pianist in the world who is her superior
musically or technically. How had they all been taken in?

2 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

Jeremy Nicholas was one of the few critics to meet Joyce Hatto. The interview took place with
her husband in the restaurant of the University Arms Hotel in Cambridge on July 26th 2005
over a most enjoyable lunch. Barrington-Coupe seemed a likeable old buffer, Nicholas
wrote on a website, who chipped in from the sidelines. Hatto was elegantly dressed in a
once-expensive rather dated tweedy twinset and pearls and had a face of keen intelligence
and one that had worn well. Nicholas asked to examine her hands, which were small, pliable
but muscular: pianists hands--at least the romantic notion of them.
Speaking to me recently, and in spite of everything that has happened since, he remembered
her almost fondly. She was a smashing lady, he said, completely dotty, wouldnt stick to an
answer, not because she was being evasive, but because she had a butterfly mind. You
couldnt ad lib the musicological facts she came out with without being a thorough,
experienced musician. Four months after the scandal broke Nicholas says he still cant
square the gay, chatty, vivacious, quirky, extensively knowledgeable lady who was like a dotty
old aunt, being involved in anything that was twistedthis grubby con.
The critics had been beguiled by the discovery that Hatto, who was vaguely remembered if at
all as a performer from the 1960s and 1970s, had been linked to some of the greatest
musicians of the 20th century. She was born in Maida Vale in 1928, the only daughter of an
antiques dealer who was a devotee of Rachmaninov, who never missed any opportunity to
hear him play. It was almost as if Rachmaninov was a relative. Her piano teacher, a Russian
migr called Serge Krish, was a pupil of the legendary Italian pianist, Ferruccio Busoni. In
the 1940s Hatto rejected the sexism of the Royal Academy of Music--where she had been
told its really more important for a young girl like you to be able to cook a roast dinner and
not bother with all this!--and sought instruction from great pianists, including Alfred Cortot,
Benno Moiseiwitsch and Sviatoslav Richter. To reach my own standards, I needed to have a
good technique, Hatto told Dyer of the Boston Globe. When I was young, people told me I
had two speeds, quick and bloody quick. She became the preferred interpreter of the
composer Arnold Bax and worked with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. Paul
Hindemith, another composer who knew her, said that she possessed a technique beyond
prestidigitationHer wonderful independence of line would surely have seduced Johann
Sebastian into composing another Forty Eightjust for her.
But Hattos career was a literary fraud as well as a musical one--or rather, a concatenation of
truths, half-truths and fiction that is impossible to disentangle. There is a striking absence of
documentation for this biography so rich in musical heritage. What little does exist is of
dubious provenance. An interview with Burnett James, a critic, was entitled Joyce Hatto--A
pianist of extraordinary personality and promise and was supposed to date from 1973. But it
was never published and appeared on the internet only in 2002.
In fact, the irrefutable documents, such as they are, hint at a very different story. By the time
Hatto married Barrington-Coupe in 1956, she had already received the kind of reviews that
would plague her career. Joyce Hatto grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozarts D
Minor concerto and was impeded from conveying significant feelings towards the work,
especially in quick figuration, wrote the Timess critic of her performance at Chelsea Town
Hall in October 1953. She went on to appear in a variety of prestigious venues, including the
Royal Festival Hall, but the concerts were arranged by her husband and time and again the
reviews were disappointing. In the 1960s she failed three auditions to become a BBC
performer and taught at Crofton Grange School in Hertfordshire.
In 1970 Barrington-Coupe arranged for her to record Arnold Baxs Symphonic Variations
with the Guildford Philharmonic conducted by Vernon Handley. The recording received a
favourable review. Joyce Hatto gives a highly commendable account of the demanding piano

3 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

part, wrote Robert Layton in Gramophone and, listening to the performance today, it remains
impressive, the high-water mark of her recording career.
In 1971 Hatto embarked on an ambitious series of recitals in which she planned to present
the entire works of Franz Liszt. But something was awry. Reviews in the Daily Telegraph refer
to lapses of concentration and her very overwrought condition. On one occasion, before
the first half of the recital had been reached, the pianist suddenly became victim of a
nervousness so extreme that she had to absent herself halfway through a Polonaise.
Andrew Ball, now a professor at the Royal College of Music, was at her final Wigmore Hall
recital, on July 7th 1976. It was extraordinarily accident-prone and just very bizarre playing,
he told me. There was something slightly crazy about it--it was more than just not-very-good
playing. Having said that, it did have this slightly wayward, pretentious air about it: it had
some of the affectations of a great pianist without any of the goods.
Joyce Hatto did not plan to vanish into the wilderness after she gave up performing in 1976.
Between 1980 and 1990, some 70 cassette titles of her work were released, but they were
mostly ignored by the critics. Precisely when the deception began remains unclear; certainly
by 1993, when Eugen Indjics Chopin Mazurkas were issued under Hattos name, wholesale
purloining was under way. But it took another ten years before the fraud could blossom. In the
early 1990s it would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to manipulate recordings and
disguise their provenance, but by the turn of the century the software was cheap enough for
them to be mastered on a home computer for just a few hundred. And the explosion of the
classical CD catalogue made huge numbers of recordings available for plunder.
The use of obscure source material is one of the many ironies of Hattos critical success. Most
great pianists--Cortot, Horowitz, Gould, for example--have an unmistakable interpretive
signature: you can tell whos playing within seconds. Their touch, tone, attack, pedalling,
rubato--their whole conception of sound is unique. Of necessity, Hatto had to use performers
who would not be easily recognised, humble, egoless servants of the text. These pianists,
many of whom had toiled in obscurity, were now praised in their Hattoised incarnations for
their essential musical humility, as Andrew McGregor characterised Hattos pianism on BBC
Radio 3. Or as Frank Seibert expressed it in the German magazine Fono Forum in June
2004: the piano art of Joyce Hatto stands in contrast to todays ostentatious music business
to which her playing today is a corrective. She makes music without imposed superlatives. It
was a notion that Hatto reinforced in interviews: Play what the composer has taken so much
trouble to write downAs interpreters, we are not important, we are just vehicles.
But as the Hatto bandwagon gathered pace, a murmur of dissent could be heard in internet
chatrooms. There is not one facet of her playing that is outstanding, wrote one listener. She
is just a very good pianist and no more. I have noticed something eerie, noted another,
under the alias Dr Seth Horus. The pianist playing the Mozart sonatas cannot be the pianist
playing Prokofiev or the pianist playing Albniz. I have the distinct feeling of being the victim
of some sort of hoax. Does anyone else share these feelings?
One person who did was a 43-year-old pianophile from Berlin, called Peter Lemken. He had
noticed that Hattos concerto recordings were made with the improbably named National
Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ren Khler. Lemken could not find any
background information on the conductor. I was surprised, because I have worked with a
number of conductors and the most obscure recordings are listed by them somewhere, he
told me. Lemken mentioned this on an internet newsgroup and two days later a biography of
Ren Khler appeared on Music Web--one of the online retailers for Concert Artists. The
information, which had been supplied by Barrington-Coupe, ran as follows:

4 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

Brought up in Weimar, Ren was a pupil of Raoul Koczalski (1884-1948) (via his teacher
Mikuli a direct descendant by tutelage of Chopin) In 1936, he briefly continued studying
music at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow.... In 1940 his left hand was crushed
irreparably by a young German officer, so-called. In the summer of 1942 he was deported to
Treblinka. Here--one of less than a hundred believed to have survived, he was found by the
advancing Red Army (circa 1944). Unimpressed by his mixture of Polish-French and GermanJewish stock, his Soviet interrogator sent him on a train heading East for a labour
camp--where he remained from 1945-70. Ren kept such things to himself...He never desired
any attention from the media. Physically, he was a messHe died from prostate cancer.
Lemken contacted the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and was told that no one called Ren
Khler had ever studied there. In February 2006 he told the newsgroup that he thought
Khler had never existed.
Over the next few months the rumours proliferated. One theory was that a group of unknown
musicians was pulling a trick on the critics, pooling their varied abilities under the name of
Hatto. James Inverne, editor of Gramophone magazine, was contacted by two critics who
wished to remain anonymous, to warn him off this story. Jeremy Nicholas, who had staked his
reputation on Hatto, now decided that enough was enough. In June 2006, in an open
challenge published in Gramophone he called for anyone with evidence that must stand up in
a court of law to come forward and prove the alleged fakery. Nobody did.
We will never know if Hatto was aware of this cloud of suspicion or whether she had any
inkling of the disgrace that was soon to follow. On June 29th she died. Obituaries across the
word hailed her achievement. Hatto had entered the canon of Great Pianists. Until iTunes
dislodged her.
William Barrington-Coupe is a sprightly 76-year-old with a glint in his small, inscrutable eyes.
When I visited him in his modern, detached house in Royston more than three months after
the story broke, he began by ushering me into the music room where Joyce had died just
under a year ago. Dominated by a mahogany concert grand Steinway, the room was dark and
chilly; piles of piano music lay strewn about. There were two china cats, a squirrel and a
rabbit. Crippled by deep-vein thrombosis, Barrington-Coupe explained, Joyce had slept on a
hospital bed a few feet from the piano. Each morning he used to help her on to the piano stool
and she would play the last movement of Chopins Funeral March sonata, a maelstrom of
virtuosity. She had played it on the day of her death, at about 8.00 in the morning.
It was hard to know quite what to make of this story, but it was typical of the man. After
Gramophone published the damning evidence of fraud on February 15th, he initially insisted
his wifes recordings were genuine. Then two weeks later, in a letter to Robert von Bahr of BIS
records, from whom he had purloined Laszlo Simons recording of the Liszt Transcendental
Studies, he made an astonishing confession. He claimed to have embarked on the deception
because his wifes recording sessions were marred by little gasps of pain and he was at a
loss to know how to cover the interruption. He wanted to give her the illusion of a great end to
a career that had, as he saw it, been unfairly overlooked. My wife was completely unaware I
did this, he had claimed, and I simply let her hear the finished editing that she thought was
completely her own work.
It was a touching story, but Barrington-Coupes past hardly lent it credibility. In the 1960s he
had released records by artists under a variety of pseudonyms for the Delta, Summit and
Lyrique labels. The conductors Felix Heiss, Otto Strauss and Wilhelm Havagesse (have a
guess); pianists, August du Maurier and Marius Ubendorff and the soprano Herda Wobbel
were some of the pseudonyms Barrington-Coupe concocted for recordings that were believed
to have been copied from radio broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain. After the collapse of
5 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

Triumph Records in 1962, Barrington-Coupe began importing radios from Hong Kong for sale
in London markets and by mail order. On May 17th 1966, along with four co-defendants, he
was found guilty of failing to pay 84,000 in purchase tax and sent to prison for a year.
Summing up, Judge Alan King-Hamilton said: I think it is a thousand pities that not one of
you had the good sense to plead guilty. These were blatant and impertinent frauds, carried
out in my opinion rather clumsily.
Sitting in his house in Royston, I asked Barrington-Coupe about the Hatto recordings. I was
surprised that he made no reference to his wifes gasps of pain. Im not saying I havent
tinkered, he told me over coffee and biscuits. I had to. Sometimes there were electrical
problemsI dont think I changed anything from her actual performances. Ive matched
everything in, there hasnt been vast jiggery-pokery. The performances are really pretty well
as is. If it goes to court I shant waver on it. I know what I did, and I know that whatever Mr
Rose says, and whatever his wretched graphs show, that they must be wrong.
Barrington-Coupes problem is that Roses wretched graphs are accurate to 44,100 samples a
second. They show no sign of patching: only evidence of wholesale theft. Using the cheap
technology that made the crime possible, an international team of pianophiles is hunting down
the sources of every single Hatto CD and the full scope of the deception is now clear for all to
see--Farhanmalik.com contains up-to-date details of the authentications.
Nevertheless, Barrington-Coupe may well escape prosecution. Given the circumstances
surrounding Hattos sickness and fate, Robert von Bahr declared on his website in February
this year, there may be deeply feltif misguided--personal reasons for itIm not moved to
seek revenge. He added that it would be tricky to prove financial loss for the Laszlo Simon
recordings and, in any case, he was not convinced that Barrington-Coupe had made much
money from the fraud.
Hattos role in deciding which recordings to steal may never be known. I suspect she was an
active accomplice. On the way up to Royston I had listened to an interview she gave to New
Zealand radio in April 2006, two months before she died. Its the one surviving interview and it
was a revelation. With her rapid, high-pitched voice and tendency to break into a manic
giggle, she sounded delightful.
After a few hours in the company of Barrington-Coupe, who was often convulsed with
laughter, it was easy to imagine them listening to recordings together and picking out ones
they liked almost in a spirit of levity. As the day wore on and we listened to one CD after
another of recordings that Barrington-Coupe didnt realise had been identified, I sensed how
bereft of company he now felt after 50 years of marriage.
We just loved each other, he said. There was a definite kind of telepathy between us. She
used to say: it wasnt what Ive got; it wasnt what youve got: its what weve got. Together,
they shared a deep knowledge of piano performance. In so far as the deception involved
splicing together different recordings with musically satisfying results, it was a genuinely
creative enterprise. Quite possibly, the fraud started as a game that took on a life of its own
and brought an isolated, childless couple into contact with a world of critics and collectors who
could be simultaneously befriended and mocked for their gullibility. I dont think youll find me
gumming up the motorway with these, Joyce Hatto wrote to the critic Christopher Howell,
about her purloined (and outrageously speeded up) performances of the Transcendental
Etudes. Its tempting to conclude that the mockery of a musical and critical establishment that
had shunned them both must have been one of the frauds most satisfying results.
When I suggested this to Barrington-Coupe, he for once looked me directly in the eye. Thats
what I intended to do. Thats what I intended to do. And thats what she intended to doBut

6 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

she intended to do it with her own playing, he added ruefully.

Of all the critics to have been fooled by Hatto none was more eminent than Bryce Morrison, a
celebrated teacher, writer and broadcaster. An elegant stylist, with an encyclopedic
knowledge of piano performance, Morrison has distilled the elusive genius of the great
pianists in memorable prose. After Hatto died, Morrison was frequently visited by BarringtonCoupe, who bore handfuls of CDs and gifts of homemade jam. Doubting Thomases, of which
there are apparently many, may well wonder how Joyce Hatto achieved such unalloyed
mastery and musicianship when tragically beset by ill health, Morrison wrote in a series of
reviews designed to mark her achievement. But others will surely celebrate an awe-inspiring
triumph of mind over matter, of the indomitable nature of the human spirit. In Liszt, her
warmth, affection, ease and humanity strike you at every turn; in Messiaen, he lauded her
very recognisable strength of character and personality; in Mozart Hatto trumps all the
acesabove all, her warmth and humanity shine through page after page.
I was curious to know how Morrison looked back on this catalogue of error and asked him if
felt he should have known better. No, I dont, he told me. I entirely disagree. Id tell you if I
did. I dont see any reason why I should know better. Im not a cynic. Im not. I had no
evidence at the time it wasnt genuine. I think you are as a critic as objective as possible:
thank God ones a human being. You are influenced by story. By someones appearance. But
if youre suggesting I was having my arm twisted by an extra-mural agenda, it is not true at all.
I believe one has got to have a very strong sense of human empathy.
Yet Morrisons empathy for Hatto had surely warped his critical judgment. Several years ago
his verdict on Yefim Bronfmans recording of Rachmaninovs Third Piano Concerto was that
the pianist operates at too low a voltage, he lacks the sort of angst and urgency which has
endeared Rachmaninov to millions. Reviewing the same recording in its Hatto incarnation--it
was one of the few that had not been tampered with--he declared it among the finest on
recordabove all, everything is vitally alive and freshly considered. He went on to praise the
soloists clarity and verve that will astonish even this concertos most seasoned listeners.
But which of these verdicts was the more credible? I wanted an answer to a question that had
fascinated me from the outset: were the performers he chose a collection of brilliant,
overlooked artists? If so, Barrington-Coupe had perhaps performed a valuable service to
listeners, however perversely, as an impresario of under-recognised talent.
The collectors I spoke to did not see it that way. Caine Alder, a 73-year-old retired piano
teacher from Salt Lake City, bought the entire Hatto discography. After the scandal broke he
got rid of the lot. Theres no doubt that who you have pictured in your mind when youre
listening is a big factor, he said. I can hear about five notes played by Horowitz and I know
who it is. Rubinstein has his own personality. So this is a big part of my listening. So suddenly
I have a hundred CDs and I dont know who the hells playing them. Its a mish-mash.
Alder has touched on something fundamental to our appreciation of performances. Do you
experience King Lear, or Robert Stephensor Paul Schofields Lear? It is a paradox that
these masterpieces come mostly vividly to life bent through the prism of an almighty
interpretative ego. And therein lies the trap. Although our knowledge of the performer
enhances our aesthetic experience, it inevitably distorts our critical judgment.
Neil Raymond also bought almost the entire collection of Hatto recordings. A venture
capitalist from Montreal, he owns one of the largest private collections of classical CDs in the
world. Raymond sees things differently from Alder. One of the feelings I have is kind of
personal self-condemnation, he said. So much of my reaction was based on a rooting
interest in Joyce Hatto as an artist, her illness, the human-interest side of it. I, no less than the

7 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

critics, had turned it into an artistic determination.

Raymonds self-criticism was crystallised by the discovery that he already owned many of the
Hatto recordings. I find many of the discs that I responded to very uninspired in their original
form. Theyre fairly middling, unimpressive performances, he continued. One cant help but
extrapolate from that recognition to how many other listening experiences one has bought the
same lack of critical aptitude to the table.
That discovery has changed how Raymond listens to music, whoever is performing. He used
to idolise Furtwanglers recording of Beethovens Ninth Symphony. Now I hear the slow
movement and I hear slovenly, disreputable playing. Was this realisation a good thing? I
think it will make me a more astute, acute and sophisticated listener, he replied after a long
pause. But its not a pleasant self-recognition.
ONLINE POSTSCRIPT, September 4th: Could Joyce Hatto's "recordings" somehow have
been better than the purloined originals? Rod Williams adds a further twist to his tale ...
The Hatto affair raises a number of intriguing aesthetic questions. If Hatto was considered
one of the greatest pianists no-one has ever heard of (as Richard Dyer said in the Boston
Globe), does this mean that 66 largely-obscure pianists who provided her material deserve
the same accolade? Or did the magic spell of these recordings vanish when Hatto was
revealed as a fraud? And were Mr Barrington-Coupes doctored recordings actually an
improvement on the original versions?
With a few exceptions, the 66 pianists identified so far are an obscure collection. Of necessity,
Mr Barrington-Coupe had to steal from artists who would not easily be recognised: humble,
egoless servants of the text. It would have been difficult to plagiarise recordings by Mikhael
Pletnev, Ivo Pogorelich or Lang Lang, for example, pianists whose very personal approach to
interpretation is immediately recognisable.
The irony is that Hatto drew praise for her "essential musical humility"--as Andrew Macgregor
said on BBC 3. Or as Frank Siebert expressed it in a review for a German magazine, Fono
Forum: The piano art of Joyce Hatto stands in contrast to todays ostentatious music
business to which her playing is a corrective. She makes music without imposed
superlatives.
Perhaps this very absence of ego is why so many of the ripped-off pianists are not better
known. Certainly, many of them are notable for just one or two excellent CDs. Recordings
widely acclaimed by piano cognoscenti include "Nojima Plays Liszt" (Minoru Nojima, 1993,
Reference Recordings); Arthur Moreira Limas "Chopin Waltzes" (Pro Arte 177); and Sergei
Babayans "Scarlatti Sonatas" (Pro Piano records).
But many of the ripped-off recordings, deprived of the halo effect of Hattos tragically uplifting
story, now seem rather less impressive. According to Gregor Benko, co-founder of the
International Piano Archives in Maryland: A few of the pirated performances were excellent
or superior. Most of them, the majority of them, however, were middle of the road, chromeplated conservatory graduate style delineations of the text, without much interpretation,
personality or musical soul.
It turns out that some of the most widely acclaimed Hatto performances were lifted from
several sources and spliced together by Mr Barrington-Coupe. An American collector and
pianophile, Farhan Malik, has spent months deconstructing the forgeries. In some cases the
speeding up really does improve a performance, he tells me. I will give you an example: the

8 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/print/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-p...

Chopin Godowsky "Fourth Etude". Thats Carlo Grante. Its really much better than the
original Carlo Grante. Carlo Grante has to slow down for the middle section because its more
difficult. But Joyce Hatto doesnt. Likewise, Alexander Ghindins recording of the
Mendelssohn Rachmaninoff Scherzo from A Midsummer Nights Dream has been sped up
by 4.23%. The Hatto really is much more impressive.
Mr Malik has the greatest admiration for Hattos "Brahms Paganini Variations". All but eight of
the variations are lifted from Lilya Zilberstein on Deutsche Gramophone--an excellent
recording in its own right. Mr Barrington-Coupe has taken six variations from Matti Raekallio
on Ondine, and two variations from Evgeny Kissin on BMG. These substitutions are in all
cases an improvement over Zilberstein in those variations," says Mr Malik, "Hatto has
basically removed much of the unevenness and created a superb rendition.
Mr Malik considers this hybrid performance a masterpiece. When I told William
Barrington-Coupe about this verdict he seemed pleased. He told me he was sure that people
would still be listening to the Hatto "Brahms Paganini Variations" in 50 years time.
Arts
MUSIC
Joyce Hatto
hattogate
Source URL: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-piano-swindle

9 de 9

02/10/2014 11:33