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.

Gawd, I can't stop the googling. It's a classical music train wreck.

From her obit in The Guardian, July 10, 2006:

After 1972, when her cancer returned, Joyce was plagued by the uncertain arrival of excruciating pain on the concert platform, often making it necessary to cancel at the last minute. "When a critic commented, rather ungallantly, about my appearance, I decided in December 1976 that I would give up public performances. Major surgery was only partly successful. Chemotherapy and radio therapy proved completely unhelpful." A new form of treatment from the US "allowed me to keep my energy levels sufficiently high to seek gainful employment in the recording studio".

The microphone, luckily, loved her - and she enjoyed the process hugely. Unlike most artists, her discs are not performances patched together from a number of takes. She preferred to record complete movements without edits, stating proudly: "I do my practising at home."

Joyce's self-effacement and lack of vanity and also distinguished her from many of her peers. There was no official management biography. She kept no reviews or scrapbooks. Her desire was to be entirely at the service of the great composers she fervently revered. Nothing else mattered. Her husband survives her.

[link]

Her obit in Gramophone:

Joyce Hatto, the English pianist who died, aged 77, on June 30, has been aptly described as 'a hidden jewel' and 'the greatest living pianist that no one has heard of.'

Born in London she sought advice from a wide variety of sources including Cortot, Clara Haskil and Richter (a goodly trio if ever there was one), Hindemith and Nadia Boulanger. Calm and indomitable from the start, she rejected a more conventional Conservatoire education after the Royal Academy of Music had told her that a career as a pianist was a daunting prospect for a young girl who would be better employed learning how to cook a good roast. During the 1940s and 1950s she appeared with conductors such as de Sabata, Beecham, Kletzki and Martinon and even when diagnosed with cancer at the age of 41 she toured Russia and Scandinavia to the highest critical acclaim.

Forced, in 1979, through illness to withdraw from the concert platform she achieved an astonishing renaissance. Phoenix-like she reinvented herself, creating a large and inclusive discography including complete Sonata cycles of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, all of Chopin’s solo piano music, the Chopin-Godowsky Etudes and Albeniz's Iberia. Ignored by the press (a diffidence that extends to this day) she must have secretly wondered at the success of other less gifted pianists. But as she herself so modestly put it, 'as interpreters we are not important; we are just vehicles. Our job is to communicate.' She also expressed the belief that 'Shakespeare understood the entire human condition and so did the great composers.'

Very much an artist for whom the spirit of the composer came first, Joyce Hatto's rich legacy will surely be considered and discussed by all serious musicians long after her recent passing.

[link]

I noted that the critic who uncovered the hoax with his iTunes was also affiliated with Gramophone.