Joyce Hatto scandal
p2pnet.net news:- When classical recording artist Joyce Hato died, “she was one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced,” said The Guardian. “Before the appearance of press and internet articles earlier this year, it was widely assumed that she had left us some years ago. In a sense she had: from the early 1970s she suffered from a cancer that not only made her the longest surviving patient treated by Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, but also prevented her from appearing in public for the past 30 years.”
And in 2005, Richard Dyer, then a Boston Globe critic, wrote Joyce Hatto “must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of,” says the The Boston Globe, continuing:
“Hatto died of cancer at 77 last year, having developed, late in life, an enthusiastic following of music buffs.”
But it was all an illusion. The husband of the then dying classical pianist admits he faked parts of his wife’s CDs to, “give her the illusion of a great end to an unfairly overlooked career,” says Gramophone.
William Barrington-Coupe, married to Joyce Hatto, who died of cancer in June, 2006, told the BIS label to admit faking parts of CDs by Joyce Hatto, says the story.
Robert von Bahr’s BIS records had one of the first identified cases, it states, going on that the ‘Hatto’ recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies exactly matched the soundwaves on Laszlo Simon’s BIS production, “And it was to von Bahr whom Barrington-Coupe wrote his letter of confession.”
Says the Gramophone post:
Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself. Recording session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem passages.
Until, that is, he remembered the story of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf covering the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the famous EMI recording of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Surely something similar could apply here, he reasoned. He began searching for pianists whose sound and style were similar to that of his wife, and once he had found them he would insert small patches of their recordings to cover his wife’s grunts.
As he grew more adept at the practice, he began to take longer sections to ease the editing process, and discovered, he says, by accident how to digitally stretch the time of the source recordings to disguise the sound. He would, he says, use Hatto’s performances as a blueprint and source recordings which were along the same lines (Laszlo, for instance, shared a teacher with his wife and so, Barington-Coupe says, had the same kind of style and technique).
The performances were hailed as superb in Gramophone and elsewhere, and finally his wife â⬠fading fast â⬠had the appreciation that her husband felt was rightfully hers. According to his letter, though, she did not hunger for fame and when told of the admiring article Jeremy Nicholas wrote for Gramophone early in 2006 (which had a great effect in concentrating critical eyes and ears upon her), she said: ‘It’s all too late.’
“I’m tired,” Gramophone Barrington-Coupe saying. “I’m not very well. I’ve closed the operation down, I’ve had the stock completely destroyed, and I’m not producing any more. Now I just want a little bit of peace.”
But how much peace he’ll get, “depends on how the industry reacts,” states the story, adding:
“Von Bahr tells Gramophone that he is unlikely to take action himself, as proving financial loss for his Simon recordings would be tricky. He has no idea, he adds, whether Barrington-Coupe is wealthy or not, and in any case, extracting damages from him might be very difficult. ‘I’m not moved to seek revenge,’ he says, ‘but I’m very glad that the truth is at last known’.”
Now, “the search is on for the real artists behind the recordings,” says The Boston Globe.
“Von Bahr said he spoke to Simon yesterday morning and urged him to take advantage of the publicity. ‘He has gotten more PR than he would get in five lifetimes,’ von Bahr said. ‘This is the time for him to go out and get those concerts’.”
Also See:
The Guardian – Joyce Hatto, July 10, 2006
The Boston Globe – Cherished music wasn’t hers, February 26, 2007
Gramophone – ‘I did it for my wife’, February 26, 2007
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February 27th, 2007 at 9:58 am
so it aint just rap artists