Category: Music

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:
Continue reading Classical Music Scandal!

Mark Evanier isn’t a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. But, then, he doesn’t like cole slaw either. Hitchcock is my favorite director, at least up to Psycho, but Evanier considers even that movie a disappointment.

Hitchcock can, I suppose, be categorized as a genre director of thrillers; but that would be the same as saying John Ford was a genre director of westerns, or Frank Capra specialized in screwball comedies.

NPR has a feature on a new book about the music in Hitchcock’s movies. Click here to hear. The audio player below has Bernard Herrmann conducting a brilliant arrangement of his music for Psycho, 14 minutes long, that I transferred from an old LP.