Joyce Hatto

Early life and early career

Joyce Hatto was born in St John's Wood, London. Her father was an antique dealer and piano enthusiast. As a promising young professional, she played at a large number of concerts in London and throughout Britain and Europe, beginning in the 1950s. There were concertos (accompanied by the Boyd Neel, Haydn, and London Symphony Orchestras, and many others), solo recitals at the Wigmore and Queen Elizabeth Halls and elsewhere, as well as concerts by "pupils of Joyce Hatto" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She supplemented her earnings with work as a répétiteur for the London Philharmonic Choir, working under such conductors as Sir Thomas Beecham and Victor de Sabata; and as a piano teacher, both privately and at schools including Crofton Grange, a girls' boarding school in Hertfordshire. She was also active in the recording studios, for several companies such as Saga Records, in England, Germany (Hamburg) and Paris.

Critical reception

Her playing drew mixed notices from the critics. A critic for The Times wrote of an October 1953 performance at Chelsea Town Hall that "Joyce Hatto grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozart's D minor piano concerto and was impeded from conveying significant feelings towards the work, especially in quick figuration." Trevor Harvey wrote of her Saga recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 "one wonders ... whether her technique is really on top of the difficulties of this music ... She shows a musical sense of give and take with the orchestra but it remains a small, rather pallid performance" (The Gramophone, August 1961).

Vernon Handley, who conducted the Guildford Philharmonic on Hatto's 1970 recording of Sir Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations for her husband's Revolution label, said; "[a]s a solo pianist, she was absolutely marvellous. She had ten wonderful fingers and she could get round anything and also she was an extraordinarily charming person to work with, even if she could be very difficult." In another interview, after the 2007 hoax perpetrated by her husband had been revealed, he added; "[s]he had a very doubtful sense of rhythm ... [t]he recording of the Bax was a tremendous labour." Still the record received a favourable review: "Joyce Hatto gives a highly commendable account of the demanding piano part," wrote Robert Layton (Gramophone, February 1971).

In 1973, Hatto gave the world premiere of two recently published Bourrées by Frédéric Chopin in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. However, in 1976 she stopped performing in public and moved to Royston, Hertfordshire. It was later claimed that she already had cancer at the time. However, the consultant radiologist who saw her every six weeks for the last eight years of her life stated that she was first treated for ovarian cancer in 1992, fourteen years before her death, and had had no previous history of the disease.

Fraud

In Hatto's last years, more than 100 recordings falsely attributed to her appeared. The repertoire represented on the CDs included the complete sonatas of Beethoven, Mozart and Prokofiev, concertos by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mendelssohn, and most of Chopin's compositions, along with rarer works such as the complete Godowsky Studies on Chopin's Études. The recordings were released, along with piano recordings falsely attributed to Sergio Fiorentino, by the Concert Artist Recordings label, run by Hatto's husband William Barrington-Coupe, who had a long history in the record industry. To go along with the release of these 'Hatto' recordings, stories began to be spread by Barrington-Coupe about his wife's contacts in the distant past with many of the greatest musicians of the mid-twentieth century, all by then dead; even the distinguished critic Neville Cardus had been dazzled by her playing, according to a story found in one obituary.

From 2003 onwards, the recordings attributed to Hatto began to receive enthusiastic praise from a small number of participants on various Usenet groups, mailing lists, and web forums, sparked by a blind-listening test in December 2002 posted on ThePiano Yahoo! group featuring a recording under Hatto's name of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz. Specialised record review magazines and websites, such as Gramophone, MusicWeb and Classics Today, as well as newspapers such as The Boston Globe, eventually discovered Hatto, reviewed the recordings (with mostly very favourable notices), and published interviews and appreciations of her career; in one case, she was described as "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of." Those praising the recordings included Tom Deacon, a former record producer for Philips, who produced that label's Great Pianists of the 20th Century series and was so fooled he praised and damned the same recording thinking that one was by Hatto and the other by Matsuzawa; Bryce Morrison, a long-time reviewer for Gramophone; Jed Distler, a reviewer for "Gramophone" and Classics Today; Ateş Orga, a music critic who also wrote some of the liner notes for Concert Artist, as well as an obituary; and Ivan Davis, a well-known professional pianist.

In May 2005, the musicologist Marc-André Roberge reported on the Yahoo! Godowsky group that, in Hatto's version of the Chopin-Godowsky Studies on the Concert Artist label, a misreading of a chord was identical to one on the Carlo Grante recording (AIR-CD-9092, released 1993). However, this coincidence did not prompt Roberge (or others) to investigate further, and verification of the copying from the Grante disc only occurred in 2007.

In early 2006, doubts about various aspects of Hatto's recording output were expressed, both in the rec.music.classical.recordings Usenet group and, following the publication of a lengthy appreciation of Hatto in the March issue of Gramophone, by readers of that magazine. In particular, some found it hard to believe that a pianist who had not performed in public for decades and was said to be fighting cancer should produce in her old age a vast number of recordings, all apparently of high quality. It also proved difficult to confirm any of the details of the recordings made with orchestra, including even the existence of the conductor credited. The doubters were vigorously countered, most publicly by critic Jeremy Nicholas who, in the July 2006 issue of Gramophone, challenged unnamed sceptics to substantiate their accusations by providing evidence that would "stand up in a court of law". Nicholas's challenge was not taken up, and in December, Radio New Zealand was able, in all innocence, to re-broadcast its hour-long programme of glowing appreciation of the Concert Artist Hatto CDs. This programme included excerpts from a telephone interview with Hatto herself, conducted on 6 April 2006, in which she said nothing to dispel the presenter's assumption that she was the sole pianist on all the CDs.

The favourable reviews and publicity generated substantial sales for the Concert Artist CDs: in 2006, one online retailer did £50,000 worth of business with Barrington-Coupe. Barrington-Coupe himself claimed to have sold 3,051 Hatto CDs in 2005 and 2006, and 5,500 from 2007 up to February 2009, and that he had made a "thumping great loss" on them.

Hatto died on 29 June 2006 in Cambridge, England. Barrington-Coupe died in 2014.

Fraud revealed

In February 2007, it was announced in a series of articles in Gramophone and the magazine's website (after editor James Inverne commissioned an intensive investigation from audio expert Andrew Rose and others) that the CDs ascribed to Hatto had been discovered to contain copies, in some cases digitally manipulated (stretched or shrunk in time, re-equalised and rebalanced), of published commercial recordings made by other artists. While some of these artists were well-known, the majority were less so. When Brian Ventura, a financial analyst from Mount Vernon, New York, put the recording of Liszt's Transcendental Études credited to Hatto into his computer, the Gracenote database used by the iTunes software identified the disc not as a recording by Hatto but as one by László Simon. On checking online samples of the Simon recording, Ventura found it to be remarkably similar to the version credited to Hatto. He then contacted Jed Distler, a critic for Classics Today and Gramophone, who had praised many of the recordings ascribed to Hatto.

Says Distler,

An identification of the source of another recording, which had been in preparation for some months, was released the following day by the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM, based at Royal Holloway, University of London) as a by-product of research on performances of Chopin Mazurkas. Within a week of the initial story being posted on the Gramophone website on 15 February, the sources for some 20 of Hatto's Concert Artist CDs had been identified.

On each of the concerto recordings published in Hatto's final years under her name, the conductor's name was given as "René Köhler", and Barrington-Coupe provided a detailed biography for "Köhler". The information given there has not withstood careful scrutiny. The conductors whose work is represented on the concerto recordings credited to Hatto and Köhler are now known to include Esa-Pekka Salonen, André Previn and Bernard Haitink, while the orchestras, claimed to be the National Philharmonic-Symphony and the Warsaw Philharmonia, are now known to include the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia, and the Royal Philharmonic.

Admission of fraud

Barrington-Coupe initially denied any wrongdoing but subsequently admitted the fraud in a letter to Robert von Bahr, the head of the Swedish BIS record label that had originally issued some of the recordings plagiarised by Concert Artists. Bahr shared the contents of the letter with Gramophone magazine, which reported the confession on its website on 26 February 2007. Barrington-Coupe claims that Hatto was unaware of the deception, that she would hear the final recordings believing that they were all her own work, and that he acted out of love and made little money from the enterprise, and that he started out by pasting portions of other pianists' recordings into recordings made by Hatto to cover up her gasps of pain. Some critics, however, have cast doubt on this version of events, not least James Inverne in Gramophone. According to the UK Daily Mail:

The discovery of plagiarised tracks on a Concert Artist compact disc released under the name of pianist Sergio Fiorentino raised further questions. Barrington-Coupe refused to help identify the sources of the recordings issued under Hatto's name, claiming that "whatever I do, it won't be enough".

Consequences

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) announced an investigation. According to a BPI spokesman in 2007, if the allegations were true, it would have been "one of the most extraordinary cases of piracy the record industry had ever seen".

Robert von Bahr of the BIS label said that he "had given a lot of thought" to suing Barrington-Coupe for damages but was inclined not to do so on the assumption that the hoax recordings were "a desperate attempt to build a shrine to a dying wife". He also said that he had advised László Simon to take advantage of the publicity by securing more concert engagements.

Barrington-Coupe himself said that he "had given up worrying" about possible legal consequences, and added that "I don't consider I've hurt anybody. A lot of attention has been drawn to forgotten artists."

The Hertfordshire police force said that it would not take any action unless a complaint was made by the copyright holder of one of the original recordings.

Television Documentary

In 2009 Channel 4 in Britain broadcast a 20 minute documentary about the scam.

Film

A biopic called Loving Miss Hatto was screened on BBC television on 23 December 2012. The screenplay is by Victoria Wood and the film was made by Left Bank Pictures. Joyce Hatto was portrayed by Maimie McCoy and Francesca Annis. Rory Kinnear and Alfred Molina played her husband.

In literature

Joyce Hatto's story inspired a novel by the French-Vietnamese author Minh Tran Huy, La Double vie d'Anna Song ("The double life of Anna Song"). Anna Song, described as "the greatest pianist that no one has heard of", appears to record a huge discography despite illness and old age. Her husband, Paul Desroches, acts as producer for the recordings. It is later revealed in a magazine that the recordings are not the work of Song, but have been stolen, by her husband, from the work of others.

Another novel drawn from the Hatto case is Lynne Sharon Schwartz's 2012 Two-Part Inventions. Schwartz has stated that her novel is directly based on the story of Joyce Hatto and William Barrington-Coupe.