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Today's Philadelphia Inquirer had an article:

Here

Good article. Follow the links to the Pristine website and the CHARM website in the article for further and seemingly irrefutable evidence of plagiarism in these CD's. This is a sad but compelling story.


Sophia

just read it, which brings up some good points. i've been reading all related articles, and find this whole thing fascinating...

I can't believe this. I mean I never heard of this pianist but this is a big disgrace.

I had been following the "glowing" reviews in Gramophone, but I smelled something dodgy almost from the beginning. Some things just didn't add up...

As I have posted in several other threads on this subject, I had no prior inside knowledge, but when this whole shabby farce exploded, I can't say I was all that surprised.

It seems her husband did it out of love:

Man Apologizes for Fake Piano Recordings

Very bizarre.

"Yes, I would do it again," he said of the fraudulent recordings, which he said he produced without his wife's knowledge. "Because it made Joyce so happy. But this time I wouldn't publish the CDs."

it doesn't have anything new, but it's more likely Hatto herself knowing what's happening all this time. what on earth those concerti could be made if she didn't know? there're no real orchestra or conductor for those, and she didn't know that when she had all those concerti recordings??

I don't think his explanation holds up-- if he was just patching, why do the entire wave forms of the performances match up with the ones that were stolen? Also, why did he keep releasing them after her death if it was all for her?

Sophia

I'm confused! If the wife didn't know about the fraudulent recordings, why did they "make [the wife] so happy"?

Regards,

here is another new article about it:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1466154.ece

2 more interesting articles about recording technology, and i find 'Gracenote' indexing classical music with digital 'fingerprint' interesting:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/reviews/chi-0703040408mar04,1,298929.story?coll=chi-technologyreviews-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/news/article/31341/mozart-would-have-loved-this-for-his-ipod/

Bruce,

I think the gentleman's assertion is that his wife didn't know about the patching (or outright plagiarizing). She may very well have done quite a number of recording sessions. If so, perhaps she didn't know that the released CDs were not really from those sessions.

Cheers,

David

P.S. For concerti, of course, this fiction would be hard to maintain.

Hi David,
yes, I think that's the charitable interpretation. I believe she discussed the concertos in interviews, making this a bit harder to hang onto as an explanation as you mentioned.

Sophia

p.s. there is also his previous history of a conviction on tax fraud. I've wondered if the choice of the label "Concert Artists" (which conveniently abbreviates to Con Artists) was an inside joke or a Freudian slip!

Wonderful article. What a fraud. The husband's excuse that he "did it out of love," adds insult to injury. He did it for money. His motivation was greed. How gullible does he think the public is. He is lucky he is not being prosecuted. Sorry,I just can't be charitable about this theft of the work of another. Gaby Tu

From dennisdutton.com:
------------

The Joyce Hatto fakes....

How has Joyce Hatto’s husband, William Barrington-Coupe, been able to get away with his farrago of nonsense about this fraud? Barrington-Coupe’s account has been accepted by the press and the public at large. As numerous headlines put it, he has “come clean.” He “did it out of love.”

“Coming clean” in his fanciful account means that (1) he only started to mix in other pianists’ tracks to cover the grunting of his diseased and suffering wife. (2) All recordings of her mix her work with other pianists. (3) He did it all for her, to make things more bearable. (4) She didn’t know a thing about it. He wins, you see: he is a hero, and she was a mere victim. He lied to her, and to everyone else, but don’t be too harsh: he did it out of love.

This is pluperfect rubbish. No one has detected any mixing of two pianists on the same track in any of her fakes. All known tracks so far are 100% other pianists, with time stretching or compression in some cases (not all).

So much for (1) and (2). As for (3) and (4), Joyce Hatto was a lively, bubbly, intelligent person who promoted these recordings to people, and was familiar with them. On the basis of recorded interviews, she was not at the end of her life anywhere near doddery sinility, and seemed to have no intellectual impairment.

Think through the possibilities. It is not implausible to imagine a recording engineer who is also a loving husband slipping a false performance of one track or other into a CD where her performance had fallen short. But we are not talking about a track or two, we are faced here with the biggest single body of pianistic output in recording history (Rubinstein’s lifetime production was less that 100 CDs, but included many, many repetitions of the same pieces). So far, not a single post-1970 recording has turned out not the be a fake.

Her catalogue includes around 30 or so concertos. This is probably more recorded concerto repertoire than Rubinstein and Horowitz combined. All of these CDs have the same non-existent conductor and orchestra. Joyce Hatto was aware of these CDs. This is not consistent with Barrington-Coupe’s claim that she did notknow what was going on. It is a palpable absudity to imagine she did not know. She signed CDs, she boasted of her exploits! Listen to the radio interviews.

The lady understood full well what was going on: she knew her catalogue, she knew the claims made about her, she knew the reviews and the critics, and she knew how to charm anyone who talked to her.

As for whether Barrington-Coupe loved his wife, it is doubtless true, but it is entirely beside the point. I’m sure Clyde loved Bonnie too.

The media coverage of the Hatto episode is a lesson in how the news cycle turns over with a story. Barrington-Coupe got in with this last bit of nonsense just at the point when editors were likely getting tired of the story. They don’t care; they have other things to worry about. Oh, journalism!

In sum, based on her letters to critics and her radio interviews, it is my considered opinion that Joyce Hatto, in addition of being a lively, chirpy, witty, bright and positive person, was also a systematic, methodical liar. The only thing she needed was to be married to a convicted fraudster who was also a recording engineer. And guess what?

Because she was so extremely pleasant and because she was an artist, it has been very difficult for people to accept the notion of her guilt. Con artists are often very engaging people with high IQs. Her positive attitude derived, I imagine, in part from thinking she was going to get away with it. She was very likely having the time of her life, at last the star she’d always longed to be. And, perhaps luckily for her, she died before she was caught out.

And when one has two con artists working in tandem...well, it seems to have been a veritable harmonic convergence!

Con artists always think they are smarter than everyone else, and they can never quite believe they can't pull it off just one more time, as Barrington-Coupe seems to have thought. I can't believe he's not being sued by all the artists he expropriated in Hatto's name.

Sophia and David,
While it's not likely, and to stay on the charitable side for a millisecond because it's so unlikely, there's one way the concertos could have happened without her full knowledge.

He could have had her play the solo portions there and told her he would merge the studio musicians in afterward. He liked to say that he used musicians working off-scale. Some have thought that on the true solo pieces he could have done her own edits with her and left the final edit in the home copy of the CD while releasing the stolen tracks. This is stretching it rather phenomenally but I thought I'd at least offer this one possible, if improbable, way.

In her radio interviews she said she wasn't the type to listen but her husband did all the time and could identify any pianist by listening. I imagine that latter is true :-)

- Andrys
--
http://www.andrys.com/hatto.html
(Hatto reference links)

When I perused Ivan Davis' web site a few weeks ago he had a section devoted to promoting Hatto. I believe someone earlier posted that he was defending her by expressing incredulity about the critics and their statistical analysis. Well, his website no longer has the links about Hatto. Has he said anything publicly?