Confession in the Joyce Hatto Scandal

New York Times
February 27, 2007
Pianist’s Widower Admits Fraud in Recordings Issued as His Wife’s
By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, Feb. 26 — The widower of a much-praised but little-known British pianist has admitted passing off recordings by other pianists as those of his ailing wife to win her the recognition that poor health had denied her, according to Gramophone, a British magazine.

Ten days ago, the magazine’s Web site, gramophone.co.uk, presented evidence that several recordings attributed to Joyce Hatto, who died in June at 77, were the works of other pianists. Soon afterward, her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, insisted that she was the sole pianist on the records issued by his small label, Concert Artist.

Gramophone now reports that in a letter to Robert von Bahr, the head of BIS Records, Mr. Barrington-Coupe confessed to using other people’s recordings as his wife’s and said he regretted his actions. “He feels that he has acted stupidly, dishonestly and unlawfully,” Gramophone reported on its Web site.

James Inverne, the editor of Gramophone, said Mr. Barrington-Coupe had confirmed the contents of the letter in a telephone interview. Mr. Inverne said Mr. von Bahr had earlier shared the contents of the letter with him.

Mr. von Bahr’s label, based in Sweden, had issued Laszlo Simon’s recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Études, the first of several recordings that were later reportedly reissued under Ms. Hatto’s name. In a statement on Friday, Mr. von Bahr said that he did not plan to take legal action against Concert Artist.

“Given the circumstances surrounding Ms. Hatto’s sickness and fate, there may be deeply felt — if misguided — personal reasons for it,” Mr. von Bahr said.

Ms. Hatto’s career as a concert pianist was cut short in 1976 when she fell ill with ovarian cancer. She moved to the countryside with her husband, a sound engineer, and continued to record well-known works from the piano repertory. Barely two years ago, music critics began praising those recordings, with one critic heralding Ms. Hatto as “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.”

On its Web site on Monday, Gramophone said that in his letter to BIS Records, Mr. Barrington-Coupe said he had used other pianists’ recordings to give his wife “the illusion of a great end to an unfairly (as he terms it) overlooked career.”

Mr. Barrington-Coupe is quoted as saying that after CD technology arrived in the early 1980s, his attempts to transfer her cassette recordings to CDs proved unsuccessful. He and his wife therefore decided to re-record her repertory.

“Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself,” Mr. Inverne wrote. “Recording session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem passages.”

It was then that Mr. Barrington-Coupe began inserting small patches from other recordings to cover his wife’s grunts, Mr. Inverne said. Subsequently, he used longer passages and discovered how to stretch the time of the original recordings digitally to disguise their origin. “However, he maintains that his wife knew nothing of the deception,” Mr. Inverne added.

Mr. Inverne said he pressed Mr. Barrington-Coupe to provide a full list of the recordings used on behalf of Ms. Hatto. “Only then will we know how good she actually was,” he said, “and only then can at least some of her reputation be salvaged.”

But Mr. Barrington-Coupe, 76, apparently declined to provide more information in his conversation with Mr. Inverne on Monday. “I’m tired,” Mr. Inverne quoted him as saying. “I’m not very well. I’ve closed the operation down. I’ve had the stock completely destroyed, and I’m not producing more. Now I just want a little bit of peace.”

In the music recording world, though, the search to find the pianists behind other recordings carrying Ms. Hatto’s name continues. Andrew Rose, a British sound engineer who first confirmed that Ms. Hatto’s recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Études was copied, noted on Monday on his Web site (pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html) that “we have yet to investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax.”