Joyce Hatto: The Greatest Fraud in Piano History

Joyce Hatto: The Greatest Fraud in Piano History

[tufsoft]

"Do you have Joyce Hatto's recording of the Shostakovitch preludes and fugues?"
"No, but come back Tuesday, we can make one up for you."

[Tenortalker]

Great video Robert! The reason that Hatto originally stopped her concert career was that she suffered a nervous breakdown on stage at a charity concert at the Royal Festival Hall. She literally ground to a halt in mid piece and collapsed with her head on the piano. After this she became a much loved piano teacher at a girls private school and rehearsal accompanist to a London Choir.
Her husband Barrington Coupe had served time in prison for failing to pay tax on imported radio sets he sold. He was a skilled recording engineer because he actually used technology to alter some of the tempi and even dynamics of these stolen performances. On some he also mixed in some phrases from Joyce's old recordings which were on reel to reel tapes. Perhaps that is how this fraud lasted so long. Apparently he didn't make vast sums of money from the discs which is why the pianists involved didn't try to get compensation.
Joyce's cancer was diagnosed much later in life. Did she really believe she had made all those recordings? Hard to tell as she was clearly mentally frail, possibly more and more deluded.
Did they do all this to make fools of the critics who hadn't given Joyce the acclaim that Barrington felt she deserved?
Whatever the reason, as you say trust between artist and public, also artist and artist should be sacrosanct.

[Polyphemus]

I often listen to a Joyce Hatto album at bedtime, so I clicked on this video to learn a little about her. This information ALmost had me ready to delete the album, but as the narrator goes on to praise the original recordings, I've decided that I can still enjoy listening. I won't know who I'm listening to, but I just won't think of them as being hers.

[philmann]

The fraud and phoniness doesn't end with Hatto. Many critics fawning over Hatto's supposed virtuosity had previously panned THE EXACT SAME RECORDINGS when they reviewed them years earlier. Who believes they don't take into account who they believe the supposed "artist" is and what his or her story supposedly is. The art world is depressingly fraudulent and fake.

[johnmac]

I guess the upside of being rubbish, is that no-one will be stealing my work 😅

[zoltanns]

Fraud in the world of classical music is more common than one might expect. I know of a renowned older concert pianist who released number of recordings where their young students played the more difficult passages. This practice dates back to the 1980s, long before the advent of today’s advanced technology. And yet, the story continues.

[lospazio]

I don't understand how it worked in the case of works with orchestra... What orchestra and what conductor were credited?

[Nunofurdambiznez]

I remember when this happened!! It was stunning!

[anthonymorris]

Hardly the “greatest” fraud in classical music history. That title surely belongs to the premiere violinist of his time, Fritz Kreisler, who performed and recorded obscure works which he claimed to have discovered, supposedly by composers such as Gaetano Pugnani, Giuseppe Tartini and Antonio Vivaldi. Only years later — when challenged by a reviewer — did Kreisler admit that he has fabricated all of these works, often attributing them to little-known composers whose names he found in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Yet many of these pieces were so good that they have been re-recorded by other violinists, variously described as either (eg.) “Pugnani, arranged Kreisler” or “Kreisler, in the style of Pugnani”. For some of the composers whose names Kreisler borrowed, the fabrications have become their best-known or only recorded works.

[sjpbrooklyn]

While there is no doubt that the “villain” is William Barrington-Coupe, I would argue that the blame is shared by the many music critics who made these CDs popular by enthusiastically hyping them, despite their inclusion of non-existent orchestras and conductors. Just to pick one at random, William Hedley, who reviewed for the now-defunct International Record Review and many other periodicals, gave her a 4-paragraph rave in his liner notes for the Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concerto, allegedly played in St. Mark’s Church, Croydon (London), with the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra conducted by René Köhler, both bogus. First of all, who writes such a review of an orchestra and a venue they have obviously never heard of or visited? I’m neither a professional musician nor a critic, but in over 60 years of concert-going in New York, and other US cities and European cities, I have heard a lot of orchestras but never this one. In fact, I know of no orchestra with a hyphenated name “philharmonic-symphony” with one exception – the “NY Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York” is the otherwise obscure official name of the NY Philharmonic. As a board member of a choral organization that has performed with the NY Philharmonic, the American Symphony, and many visiting orchestras, I believe I have performed in or visited every venue in New York City capable of hosting a group the size of the NY Philharmonic, to say nothing of the equipment required for a professional quality recording. Very few churches have that capacity, and the few that do (Cathedral of St. John the Divine for one) are known to the entire music world partly because they are frequently used for such large gatherings. There are very few conductors whose names I don’t recognize either from having listened to, seen, or even performed with. Surely some professional critic somewhere, on hearing a Hatto CD by an unfamiliar group in an unfamiliar venue, would have made the most elementary inquiry about who these people are. Then there’s the music itself. I do realize that deliberate distortions were used to produce the Hatto fakes (and yes M. A. Hamelin didn’t recognize his own recording). However, there are limits even to this. When I was 10 or so my favorite recording was Rudolf Serkin playing the Brahms first piano concerto. I must have listened to it dozens of times following the score. In my twenties I attended a concert in which his son, Peter, played the same piece. Within 1 minute of the pianist’s entrance I turned to my companion and said, “My God, it’s exactly the same as his father!” I am astonished that not once did some professional critic, who must have covered obscure as well as renowned performers, have a similar reaction on hearing music he must have heard before in his role as a critic. But perhaps this reflects more on the subjective nature of music criticism. I’m reminded of the shopworn story attributed variously to Rossini, one of the Strausses, Schoenberg (or whoever), when asked to contribute 100 crowns / schillings / francs, etc. to cover the funeral of a music critic, retorted “here’s 200, bury two.”

[albiepalbie]

It ended the career of one eminent Gramophone magazine piano critic I can think of
Three stars to the original recording
Five stars to Joyce Hatto
Bit embarrassing

[i.ehrenfest]

Remember Rosemary Brown who channeled original works from some of the greatest composers, straight from the afterlife? She was a medium. The one thing that became apparent was that Chopin et al had started to compose rather poorly, since their deaths.

[josephfleetwood]

It’s so funny you should mention this because I went for lunch with my friend who was a music critic for a Scottish paper, and he talked to me about Joyce Hatto in 2005. He said “she’s being marketed as the greatest pianist we’ve never heard of” and then he laughed and said “something tells me it’s a likely story” meaning he thought it might be a fraud. He didn’t have the comparison recordings but he suspected there was something not right.

[vannshuttleworth]

I wonder if Milli Vanilli have thoughts about this?

[GianmarioScotti]

I was thinking "what would go some ways to right this wrong is if people, talking about this fraud, would make it easy to access the works of the real artists" - and then you did just that! Thank you!

[robertp]

Although this was a crime, thankfully it did not actually harm many of the original pianists. In particular László Simon actually became more famous when the scandal was revealed.

[DouggieDinosaur]

Thanks for the great story! I'd never heard of it before. Milli Vanilli 😆

[JesseDavis]

I was at the peak of my classical piano career during this time and never heard of her, until this video.

[DSMS-nuvj]

Amazing story! Thanks for the 3 links, amazing piano Playing!!!

[st.michaelthearchangelorth]

So wonderful hearing you mention Constance Keene! My piano teacher, Clara Bolmarcich, was her classmate. Way back in the 70's, once a year, Clara would gather a few of us students and pick up Constance in Manhattan and off we'd go to Montclair to hear master classes. She was one classy lady!