[Bunnyears]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FalconP /img/forum/go_quote.gif Romantic or not, terminal illness is surely a good selling point. And I suspect some of the critics who have piled praises on her did so not because of "incentives", but because they too fell for this sentimental hype. Given her "recordings" were so hard to track down, you can hardly expect those who own them to pass a dispassionate judgment. I too have not heard of the name Hatto until now. Apparently she did not rise to fame until last year?

Sob stories are used to launch scams all the time. This story was probably exaggerated to enhance her reputation. Certainly the critics bought into it; and I did too. If Joyce Hatto was so ill she wouldn't be seen for 30 years, I'll bet it was with agoraphobia. That would explain why her husband needed to build an studio just for her better than a 30 year struggle with cancer. I'll bet he then needed to sell a lot of recordings to pay for that studio and then, ofcourse, he needed recordings that would bring critical acclaim in order to sell enough recordings. Of course, selling the records of someone who was highly neurotic rather than suffering from a "dread disease" would have been a lot harder. Let's also not forget someone like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who really did battle cancer for years (no where near 30), but continued to perform and record but with nowhere near the number of recordings of Hatto. Now that is a legacy to admire. I can't believe how ready I was to swallow the Hatto story!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Masolino /img/forum/go_quote.gif I thought Martha Argerich for one is among the greatest pianists of the 20th century...no? Let's face it, Argerich also had cancer, but she didn't let men use her illness as a way to manipulate public imagination (or so it seems ). ps. Now people are beginning to question whether Hatto actually also had cancer. It's very rare that someone could be in cancer treatment for thirty years without having been cured or dead before that.

Yes Martha is definitely one of the greats of the 20th and 21st centuries but her output was no where near as consistent and prolific as La Hatto. She also ends up canceling concert appearances seemingly on a whim. I don't try to get tickets for her appearances as she's withdrawn too many times at the last minute. Moreover, she has always has had her detractors who hate her "pedal to the metal" style of play. Hatto had no detractors. It's so hard for a critic to knock someone who is in a real life and death struggle, especially if you have never met her or talked with her, and have to rely on a visibly devoted, gentlemanly spouse for your information. I'm sure that Larry Olivier at Waterloo bridge never brought as much admiration to masculine eyes.

 

[zowie]

The guy is not just an alleged crook, he's a moron. It is so quick and easy to fix the recording so that it won't bring up someone else's CD on CDDB or whatever service when you pop it into the computer.

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by daycart1 /img/forum/go_quote.gif From what I've heard so far, the stolen recordings were from less well known performers (except for the Bronfman R2 PC).

The Brahms Piano Concerto was Ashkenazy and Haitink with the VPO. That's not exactly chopped liver!

See ya
Steve

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FalconP /img/forum/go_quote.gif Romantic or not, terminal illness is surely a good selling point.

One of the critics reports receiving an email from JH thanking him for a review and commenting in detail on how difficult it was to record that particular piece with her illness. It's a touching letter until you realize that she probably didn't write it!

See ya
Steve

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bunnyears /img/forum/go_quote.gif Sob stories are used to launch scams all the time. This story was probably just another scam. If Joyce Hatto was really ill, I'll bet it was with agoraphobia.

There was a Joyce Hatto and she was a concert pianist, and she did have terminal cancer and she did die of the disease a couple of years ago. That part is true. The fishy part is that she must have recorded like crazy in all types of repetoire at the very end of her illness to be able to release so many posthumous CDs.

See ya
Steve

 

[Bunnyears]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot /img/forum/go_quote.gif There was a Joyce Hatto and she was a concert pianist, and she did have terminal cancer and she did die of the disease a couple of years ago. That part is true. The fishy part is that she must have recorded like crazy in all types of repetoire at the very end of her illness to be able to release so many posthumous CDs. See ya Steve

bigshot,

The mystery is why no one ever heard her play except her husband in the last 30 years before her death. Not one musician has come forth nor any friend of the family. In fact, I haven't heard of anyone actually coming out and saying that they even socialized with her, let alone heard her play or practice. Hatto was a big question mark, a blank outline filled in by her husband. That's what I find so very intriguing at this point. A woman named Joyce Hatto studied piano and had a modest concert career until illness forced her retirement. At that point it is as if she disappeared from life. Her story is not that of a normal life, and that is always a mystery.

Btw, you can have cancer and be an agoraphobe. The two are not mutually exclusive. Her behavior was not typical of someone struggling with cancer. It was typical of an agoraphobe.

 

[zowie]

Maybe Hatto is the real performer and it's all the other artists who are faking. She could be the Marni Nixon of concert piano!

 

[Bunnyears]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bunnyears /img/forum/go_quote.gif David Hurwitz has weighed in on the matter today in a 2 part article that makes very interesting reading. From Part 2: We also should not forget that somewhere in this mess there is, apparently, the very human story of a career cut short, a struggle with a terminal illness, and a loving husband who lost his wife--unless that turns out to be nonsense as well. Robert von Bahr of BIS records captured the human dimension very sensitively when he told me: “If it is his love for his wife that was the reason behind this, I for one am not inclined to press charges.” True love as a justification for fraud? My goodness, David! Who would have suspected you are such a romantic!

Apparently DH has consolidated Part 2 of his Hatto editorial with his musings on the "human story" into one editorial. It certainly loses some impact that way, but still, with the evidence that the man was convicted of fraud years ago, I doubt he will have to search long for a motive.

From MusicWeb,

William protested his innocence in an e-mail and said he had no explanation for Andrew Rose's discovery but that he was trying to get hold of the Liszt 12 transcendental studies recorded by Lazlo Simon on BIS so he could listen for himself. Things have moved on too much since then. The discs were not what Concert Artist claimed them to be and it subsequently emerged that William had already served time for fraud. We had no option but to stop offering Concert Artist discs for sale from MusicWeb until it could be clear which were genuine. The discs have, as one might expect, now become more eagerly sought after but MusicWeb never held any actual stocks of discs and I probably would not have sold those if we had. I approached our reviewers and Ates Orga to see if they now wished to withdraw or amend their reviews but nobody wanted to do so.




Today in the Telegraph:

Speaking at his home in Royston, Herts, Mr Barrington-Coupe, 76, said: "She was the sole pianist on those recordings. I was there at all the important sessions, I was the engineer on the jobs and I take full responsibility for everything released on my label Concert Artist. Twelve months ago she wasn't very well known. If it was all a fake why would I put my wife's name on it.

''I would have put someone else, some Russian name and we would have sold 10 times as many.

It goes from bad to laughable.

 

[Bunnyears]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot /img/forum/go_quote.gif There was a Joyce Hatto and she was a concert pianist, and she did have terminal cancer and she did die of the disease a couple of years ago. That part is true. The fishy part is that she must have recorded like crazy in all types of repetoire at the very end of her illness to be able to release so many posthumous CDs. See ya Steve

Here's more fishy smelling tale telling:

Three weeks before her death she returned to the recording studio for the last time and, in her wheelchair, recorded Beethoven's sonata Les Adieux. (The Telegraph)

Steve, had she really managed to stay alive for 30 years after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, it would have been written up by her doctors in Lancet. To be given a diagnosis of terminal cancer means that there is no treatment except palliative treatment. Doctors will not do surgery to resect, and any chemo or radiation therapy is given only to make the sufferer more comfortable. For instance, radiation will be used on brain metastasis in order to prevent erosion of sight or hearing. Generally, the only treatment given is for the amelioration of pain; the medications that rebuild blood cells killed by chemo and radiation had not yet been developed. She may have been savaged by a critic years ago for not looking well, she may also have battled cancer. What is not believable is that she received a diagnosis 30 years ago of terminal cancer and didn't die within one or two years maximum. That is the fishiest story of them all.

 

[FalconP]

Quote:

Today in the Telegraph: Speaking at his home in Royston, Herts, Mr Barrington-Coupe, 76, said: "She was the sole pianist on those recordings. I was there at all the important sessions, I was the engineer on the jobs and I take full responsibility for everything released on my label Concert Artist. Twelve months ago she wasn't very well known. If it was all a fake why would I put my wife's name on it. ''I would have put someone else, some Russian name and we would have sold 10 times as many.

Then show us the master tapes, Mister -- and don't tell us you recorded straight to CD-Rs and your family dog ate every single of them.

 

[daycart1]

Hey Bunnyears, I see that you've edited your post about your communications with Musicweb. Did you get a nice apology?

 

[Sordel]

Fascinating. This thread is the first I've heard of this story (which will be bound, I think, to make an appearance at some point as a movie) and I hadn't bothered to read it until today because the name Joyce Hatt meant nothing to me. Here's an intriguing paragraph from the Wikipedia article which, for those who are interested, is also listing the source recordings as they become identified:

Quote:

The conductor on each of the concerto recordings put out under Hatto's name in her final years was given the name René Köhler by her record company; there is no known conductor of that name. It seems very possible that Kohler's name was inspired by that of the fine English pianist the late Irene Kohler, who recorded an Albeniz disc for Barrington-Coupe in the 1960s, which was never released in her name, for which she felt severely let down.

I suspect that somewhere in this story we will find not a con man but a fantasist: someone who is all the more interesting because his lies are so certain, in retrospect, of discovery. The human interest in the story shifts from wife to husband, but scarcely abates.

Personally, I have always been very skeptical of performers whose success is accompanied by a sob story. Eva Cassidy had a very good voice, but her posthumous sales were out of all proportion to her talent and body of work. Indeed, I'm so intolerant on these questions that I even view Jacqueline Du Pre with caution, despite the fact that she was obviously an outstanding cellist.

 

[Bunnyears]

Quote:

Originally Posted by daycart1 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hey Bunnyears, I see that you've edited your post about your communications with Musicweb. Did you get a nice apology?

No, the piece on musicweb is the same. It's just the comment about DH (Hurwitz) removing his speculations about the "human angle" that I removed. He merely shortened the two pieces into one webpage, but left in his speculations about the human angle.

Btw, if you have followed the Musicweb story, I believe Christopher Howell has some sort of explanation up now too, there. And in another piece there, it states that Barrington Coupe had an earlier conviction for fraud. That speaks volumes about the human angle. Hatto may have had a 30 year struggle with cancer but that doesn't mean her husband wasn't on the grift.

 

[bigshot]

This is the most entertaining thing I've followed in the news since Michael Jackson.

See ya
Steve

 

[Sordel]

Since I posted the quotation from Wikipedia above, the article has changed many times, so perhaps that paragraph was defamatory or simply not true. Rather nicely, for those of a schadenfreude turn of mind, there's a link to this really rather intriguing rave review from the Boston Globe in 2005.

What the review makes clear, I think, which has perhaps not been clear in early discussion of the story, is that Hatto herself must have been implicated in the deception, at least to the extent that she gave a full account of herself to the interviewer. It seems unlikely that the husband (always assuming that he knew that there were erroneous recordings going out in her name, which is not yet proven) would allow an open interview where the critic might have inquired about some work (say, a concerto) that she knew that she had not recorded. Unless she was at some level "in" on the scam.

But then, the entire story is pretty unlikely, so perhaps that is what happened.