Woooeewoowooeeoo, Woooeewoowooeeoo, WoooeewoowooEEOOOHOOOH!!, Woooeewoowooeeoo!

My singing is only slightly better than my theremin playing (and that only by default), so in case it wasn't recognizable that was Happy Birthday.

Happy Birthday jon!

Happy Birthday, Jon!!!

Happy Birthday, Jon!!!

Huh. I always thought that you can't trust those classical musicians....

[link]

The recordings of a British concert pianist who found fame in the last years of her life have been exposed as hoaxes - by Apple's iTunes music player.

Joyce Hatto died in June 2006, having become a cause célèbre with fans of classical piano in the last years of her life. A series of recordings showed her masterful command of a wide range of composers including Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Dukas and more.

Last week, a critic at the Gramophone magazine got surprise when he put a Hatto recording of Lizt's 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer. The iTunes player identified the disc as being recorded by another pianist, Lászlo Simon. He dug out the Simon album and found it sounded exactly the same as the Hatto one.

iTunes had stumbled on a hoax. To identify albums it calculates a 'discid' from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online. The Gramophone critic tried another disc - Hatto playing Rachmaninov - and again iTunes identified it as belonging to someone else. Again, the named recording - by Yefim Bronfman - sounded no different.

Gramophone decided to go to expert audio company Pristine Audio. Their detailed webpage on the Hatto case shows what they found, and lets you listen to the evidence. Examinations of the waveforms of Hatto recordings confirmed what iTunes had suggested. Many are direct copies of other pianist's work - some are tweaked versions where a recording has simply been slowed down.

Analysis, with extra added bonus Science: [link] Also, with stuff to listen to so you can see hear for yourself....

This sort of makes Hatto the Milli Vanilli of classical music, doesn't it?

This sort of makes Hatto the Milli Vanilli of classical music, doesn't it?

Yeah. Except at least the session musicians/singers for Milli Vanilli got some payment. This is outright theft.

What makes it amazing that Hatto was married to the label owner and dying while all of these recordings were coming out. The hoax was also undone by accident, by someone who was basically a defender of her status as an unknown treasure, and the label owner is still claiming that everything can be explained away. This is a lot more complex than Milli Vanilli.

Happy Birthday Jon!

Gramophone mag's article on Hatto: [link]

It's more detailed.

eta: It's listed as Gramophone Breaking News.

I guess I never considered that the classical world could have breaking news....

eta²:

Update, February 20
In a private e-mail to one of our critics, William Barrington-Coupe has refuted any accusations of wrongdoing – adding that a friend of his had compared the Bronfman and Hatto Rachmaninovs and thought the Hatto far superior. Barrington-Coupe also, the critic reported to Gramophone, asserted that Hatto had made the Godowsky recording using her own hand-prepared copies of the scores made when she was 16. He further identified recording venues used for the recordings as mainly colleges and churches where he used mobile recording facilities. He stated his intention to have his own sound engineer prepare his own comparisons.

Huh. I don't see how he can get out of this - the evidence is apparently very conclusive.