Joyce Hatto

Joyce Hilda Hatto (5 September 1928 – 29 June 2006) was an English concert pianist and piano teacher.

As a promising young professional, she played at a large number of concerts in London, and throughout Britain and Europe, beginning in the 1950s.

A critic for The Times wrote of a performance at Chelsea Town Hall in October 1953 that "Joyce Hatto grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozart's D minor piano concerto and was impeded from conveying significant feelings towards the work, especially in quick figuration."

In 1956 she married William Barrington-Coupe, a record producer who was convicted of Purchase Tax evasion in 1966.

Hatto became famous very late in life when unauthorised copies of commercial recordings made by other pianists were released under her name, earning her high praise from critics.

There were concertos in which she was accompanied by the Boyd Neel, Haydn and London Symphony Orchestras, and many others; solo recitals at the Wigmore Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and elsewhere; and concerts by "pupils of Joyce Hatto" in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She supplemented her earnings with work as a répétiteur for the London Philharmonic Choir under such conductors as Thomas Beecham and Victor de Sabata, and as a piano teacher, both privately and at schools including Crofton Grange, a girls' boarding school in Hertfordshire, where her pupils included the novelist Rose Tremain.

She was also active in the recording studios for several companies such as Saga Records in England, as well as others in Hamburg and Paris.

Hatto's playing drew mixed notices from the critics.

Trevor Harvey wrote of her Saga recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 "one wonders ... whether her technique is really on top of the difficulties of this music ... She shows a musical sense of give and take with the orchestra but it remains a small, rather pallid performance" (The Gramophone, August 1961).

Vernon Handley, who conducted the Guildford Philharmonic on Hatto's 1970 recording of Sir Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations for her husband's Revolution label, said; "[a]s a solo pianist, she was absolutely marvellous. She had ten wonderful fingers and she could get round anything and also she was an extraordinarily charming person to work with, even if she could be very difficult."

Still the record received a favourable review: "Joyce Hatto gives a highly commendable account of the demanding piano part," wrote Robert Layton (Gramophone, February 1971).

In 1973 Hatto gave the world premiere of two recently published Bourrées by Frédéric Chopin in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall.

In 1976 she stopped performing in public and moved to Royston, Hertfordshire.

It was later claimed that she already had cancer at the time.

However, the consultant radiologist who saw her every six weeks for the last eight years of her life stated that she was first treated for ovarian cancer in 1992, fourteen years before her death, and had had no previous history of the disease.

In Hatto's last years more than 100 recordings falsely attributed to her appeared.

The repertoire represented on the CDs included the complete sonatas of Beethoven, Mozart and Prokofiev, concertos by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mendelssohn and most of Chopin's compositions, along with rarer works such as the complete Godowsky Studies on Chopin's Études.

The recordings were released, along with piano recordings falsely attributed to Sergio Fiorentino, by the Concert Artist Recordings label run by Hatto's husband William Barrington-Coupe, who had a long history in the record industry.

The distinguished critic Neville Cardus had been dazzled by her playing, according to a story found in one obituary.

From 2003 onwards the recordings attributed to Hatto began to receive enthusiastic praise from a small number of participants on various Usenet groups, mailing lists and web forums, sparked by a blind-listening test in December 2002 posted on ThePiano Yahoo!

group featuring a recording under Hatto's name of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz.

Specialised record review magazines and websites such as Gramophone, MusicWeb and Classics Today, as well as newspapers such as The Boston Globe, eventually discovered Hatto, reviewed the recordings (with mostly very favourable notices) and published interviews and appreciations of her career; in one case, she was described as "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of."

Those praising the recordings included Tom Deacon, a former record producer for Philips, who produced that label's Great Pianists of the 20th Century series and was so fooled he praised and derided the same recording, thinking that one was by Hatto and the other by Matsuzawa; Bryce Morrison, a long-time reviewer for Gramophone; Jed Distler, a reviewer for Gramophone and Classics Today; Ateş Orga, a music critic who also wrote some of the liner notes for Concert Artist, as well as an obituary; and Ivan Davis, a well-known professional pianist.

In May 2005 the musicologist Marc-André Roberge reported on the Yahoo!

Godowsky group that, in Hatto's version of the Chopin-Godowsky Studies on the Concert Artist label, a misreading of a chord was identical to one on the Carlo Grante recording (AIR-CD-9092, released 1993).

Barrington-Coupe himself claimed to have sold 3,051 Hatto CDs in 2005 and 2006, and 5,500 from 2007 up to February 2009, and that he had made a "thumping great loss" on them.

In early 2006 doubts about various aspects of Hatto's recording output were expressed, both in the rec.music.classical.recordings Usenet group and, following the publication of a lengthy appreciation of Hatto in the March issue of Gramophone, by readers of that magazine.

In particular, some found it hard to believe that a pianist who had not performed in public for decades and was said to be fighting cancer should produce in her old age a large number of recordings, all apparently of high quality.

It also proved difficult to confirm any of the details of the recordings made with orchestra, including even the existence of René Köhler, the conductor credited.

The doubters were vigorously countered, most publicly by critic Jeremy Nicholas who in the July 2006 issue of Gramophone, challenged unnamed sceptics to substantiate their accusations by providing evidence that would "stand up in a court of law".

Nicholas's challenge was not taken up and in December Radio New Zealand was able in all innocence, to re-broadcast its hour-long programme of glowing appreciation of the Concert Artist Hatto CDs.

This programme included excerpts from a telephone interview with Hatto herself, conducted on 6 April 2006, in which she said nothing to dispel the presenter's assumption that she was the sole pianist on all the CDs.

The favourable reviews and publicity generated substantial sales for the Concert Artist CDs: in 2006, one online retailer did £50,000 worth of business with Barrington-Coupe.

Hatto died from ovarian cancer and deep vein thrombosis at her home in Royston, Hertfordshire, on 29 June 2006.

The fraud did not come to light until 2007, more than six months after her death.

Joyce Hatto was born in St John's Wood, London.

Her father was an antique dealer and piano enthusiast.

In another interview, after the 2007 hoax perpetrated by her husband had been revealed, he added; "[s]he had a very doubtful sense of rhythm ... [t]he recording of the Bax was a tremendous labour."

However this coincidence did not prompt Roberge or others to investigate further at that time and verification of the copying from the Grante disc would only occur in 2007.