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.
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.