Fraud in Fine Art is common. Literature is occasionally prone to scandal. Classical Music has been relatively immune.
Over the past few days there have been accusations of fraud committed by a recently deceased British pianist named Joyce Hatto. Click here to read a New York Times article about the story. Here’s a portion of it:
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.”
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.
The Pristine Classical Web site is actively documenting the alleged frauds. Click here to go the Joyce Hatto Hoax page. The comparisons between recordings are only now starting to be made, but already they seem unassailable. Most, if not all, of the recordings attributed to Hatto are, in fact, identical to those made by others.
I remember reading the article by Boston Globe Classical music writer Richard Dyer that’s mentioned above. It was glowing and uncritical. Dyer’s career has taken a serious blow and may perhaps now be over. Dyer has a trained and experienced ear, yet he failed after listening of a third of the claimed Hatto CDs to recognize them as being the work of others.
Here are excerpts from Dyer’s Boston Globe article:
AFTER RECORDING 119 CDS, A HIDDEN JEWEL COMES TO LIGHT
Richard Dyer, August 21, 2005
Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.
Hatto, now 76, has not played in public in more than 25 years because of an ongoing battle with cancer. She was once told that it is “impolite to look ill,” and after a critic commented adversely on her appearance, she resolved to stop playing concerts.
…Instead she has focused her prodigious energies on recording an astonishing collection of CDs – 119, so far, on a British label called Concert Artists.
…”Who is she?” I asked my contact at the label, who turned out to be its director – and the husband of Joyce Hatto, William Barrington-Coupe. He tucked in a sample Hatto CD along with a Fiorentino order, and I was hooked. At this point, I’ve heard only about a third of the Hatto CDs, but all of them are excellent, and the best of them document the art of a major musician. She boasts a fluent and all-encompassing technique… The records are well engineered, and she uses wonderful instruments; still, her beautiful sound is her own.
…After his wife has left the room, Barrington-Coupe says, “She doesn’t want to play in public 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.”
This is embarrassing for Dyer, given the fact the recordings represent such a variety of pianos, played by so many virtuosos, in numerous different venues. The acoustic qualities alone should be variable enough to raise suspicion. How could anyone with a critical ear say of Hatto, as Dyer did, “still, her beautiful sound is her own”? Her refusal to play in public was an obvious indicator that all was not as it seemed. I can only assume Hatto’s husband was an active participant, if not instigator, of the fraud. If proven true, and it seems likely it will be, this is a truly shameful misrepresentation.