Joyce Hatto – Fraudster

joyce

A tale of skullduggery from the usually sedate world of classical music today, culled from the weirder side of Wikipedia by the Wikiworm…

Joyce Hatto (1928 – 2006) was an English concert pianist and piano teacher who became famous very late in life when unauthorised copies of commercial recordings made by other pianists were released under her name, earning her high praise from critics. The fraud did not come to light until a few months after her death.

Joyce Hatto was born in North London, where 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.

Despite her relatively high profile, her playing drew mixed notices from the critics. 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.”

In 1976 Hatto stopped performing in public. It was later claimed that she was already battling 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.

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, and concertos by the likes of Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mendelssohn.

The recordings were released, along with piano recordings falsely attributed to the late 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.

From 2003 onwards, the recordings attributed to Hatto began to receive enthusiastic praise from a small number of participants on various web forums, sparked by a blind-listening test in December 2002 featuring a recording under Hatto’s name of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. Specialised record review magazines and websites, 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.”

In May 2005, a musicologist reported online that, in Hatto’s version of a Chopin Study, a misreading of a chord was identical to one on a Carlo Grante recording (released 1993). However, this coincidence did not prompt anyone to investigate further.

In early 2006, doubts about various aspects of Hatto’s recording output were expressed, both online 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.

The favourable reviews and publicity generated substantial sales for the CDs: in 2006, one online retailer did £50,000 worth of business with Barrington-Coupe. Barrington-Coupe himself claimed to have sold 3051 Hatto CDs in 2005 and 2006, and 5500 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.

In February 2007 it was announced in a series of articles in Gramophone and the magazine’s website 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.

Barrington-Coupe initially denied any wrongdoing but subsequently admitted the fraud in a letter to the head of the Swedish BIS record label that had originally issued some of the recordings plagiarised by Concert Artists. Barrington-Coupe claimed that Hatto was unaware of the deception, that on her deathbed 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 in order to cover up her gasps of pain.

Many critics, however, are convinced that Hatto herself was always part of the scheme and that some of her motivation was to ‘cock a snook’ at the British musical establishment for their failure to recognise her talents by a confidence trick that drew their attention to it.

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 local 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.

 

 

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In between dealing with all things technological in the Dabbler engine room, Worm writes the weekly Wikiworm column every Saturday and our monthly Book Club newsletters.

3 thoughts on “Joyce Hatto – Fraudster

  1. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    Mahlerman
    September 6, 2014 at 11:59

    Hatto was not so much a fraudster, more a competent pianist who married a ‘wrong-un’. The mystery, for me, is that when Barrington-Coupe was jailed for another fraud a decade after they were married, why Hatto welcomed him back into the marital nest? Was she stupid – or just naive?
    Add to that the vainglorious pomposity of a man who imagined that he could ‘cheat’ the 1/4400th of a second sampling rate of modern digital technology by (not so) subtly doctoring recordings that he owned, and you have a grim picture of a modern con-man. Savile without the sex.

    • Worm
      September 6, 2014 at 20:11

      He sounds like he was a proper cad, and I guess she was also wrapped around his little finger too

  2. seamussweeney1@gmail.com'
    Séamus Sweeney
    September 6, 2014 at 20:51

    This is the first Wikiworm which relates to an event whose unfolding I actually remember – a sign of age I guess.

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