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The Joyce Hatto Scandal Revisited · The Piano Maven with Jed Distler

• 0:00
  This is Jed Dissler and welcome to the Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano recordings.
• 0:15
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• 0:22
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• 0:33
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• 0:42
  18 years ago in mid February 2007, this big scandal broke out about more than 100 classical piano CDs credited to a pianist named Joyce Hatto.
• 0:56
  And as it turned out, none of these performances were by Joyce Hatto, but were rather stolen from other commercial piano CDs and released on a label called Concert Artists.
• 1:10
  And they were all credited to Joyce Hatto.
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  And I had reviewed some of these discs very favorably and so did many other CD reviewers.
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  When the truth was exposed, a bunch of newsgroup denizens weighed in saying things like, how could Jed Dissler be fooled by such a thing?
• 1:30
  Or they would say that Jed Dissler's career is finished, his reviewing career is over.
• 1:36
  Or they'd also say something like, oh, I never would have bought a Joyce Hatto record.
• 1:41
  Well, here we are 18 years later and I'm busier than ever.
• 1:46
  I'm more visible than ever as a writer, broadcaster, podcaster, and CD reviewer and commentator.
• 1:54
  And I'm busier in all of these things than at any other time in my life.
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  And, you know, my composing and piano playing careers aren't doing too badly either.
• 2:04
  So much for those newsgroup denizens.
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  But how did this all start?
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  Some of you may remember the Joyce Hatto scandal.
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  While other listeners may have been too young to recall this or maybe weren't even around.
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  So I'm going to devote this podcast episode to the Joyce Hatto scandal story.
• 2:28
  But this is from my personal perspective and, you know, other people who were involved in the scandal or exposing the scandal have very different perspectives on this.
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  Probably the most well researched and balanced and factual account of the Joyce Hatto scandal was in the article written by Mark Singer for the New Yorker magazine.
• 2:53
  And he really went out of his way to do fact checking, which is more than I can say of several other publications.
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  In fact, Mark Singer was the only journalist to whom I agreed to give an interview.
• 3:07
  When the BBC did a documentary on the Joyce Hatto scandal, they did interview me, but they wanted to have me phrase my sentences in certain ways to fit their agenda.
• 3:20
  And I found that they were trying to manipulate me and I did not appreciate that.
• 3:27
  And they also wanted me to pose with headphones and do all kinds of play acting.
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  And I was really, really irritated by that.
• 3:35
  I did not like that at all.
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  But getting back to my side of the story, it really began in the mid 1980s when I was at the Tower Records classical annex in New York City, which is where you found all of the cutouts and budget discs and cheap LPs.
• 3:57
  And I don't think there were cheap CDs yet.
• 4:02
  But they had a lot of cheap cassettes and I noticed a bin with a bunch of these historic piano cassettes on a label called Concert Artist.
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  And one item caught my eye and it was a Chopin-Mazurkas cycle by Alfred Courtauld.
• 4:21
  And I thought this is really strange.
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  I had never heard of Alfred Courtauld recording the Chopin-Mazurkas.
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  So I bought these and they sounded kind of strange.
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  I did not find that they were very good performances at all.
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  And when I asked my dear and late friend Alan Evans if he had known about this or did he get a copy of the Chopin-Mazurkas with Courtauld, he thought that they were not authentic.
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  He said that the performances don't sound anything like Courtauld.
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  And there were a few other Concert Artist cassettes that had Courtauld material that also sounded kind of suspect, like the Schumann G minor sonata, which was a work that he otherwise did not record.
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  And there were other cassettes which were legitimate, although the transfers were pretty crappy.
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  There was a cassette with I think the Raoul Koszawski Chopin etudes. It was a really bad transfer of these.
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  There was also a cassette of recordings by the Liszt people, Eugene Dalbert, and these also were pretty terrible transfers.
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  This all happened I think in 1985, if I'm not mistaken.
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  So 20 years later, I was on the internet and I followed a link from musicweb.com that led me to the Concert Artist Labels website, and they had gotten into the CD business apparently.
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  And I noticed that these Courtauld Chopin-Mazurkas that I had on cassette were for sale on CD.
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  And there also was an extensive catalog of discs featuring Sergio Fiorentino, but there was even a more industrious output from a pianist named Joyce Hatto.
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  Now I knew who Sergio Fiorentino was, but I didn't know anything about Joyce Hatto. Who was she?
• 6:27
  And I noticed that Joyce Hatto had recorded almost all of the complete works of Chopin, all of the Beethoven sonatas, the Mozart sonatas, the Prokofiev sonatas, even the Paul Dukas sonata she recorded.
• 6:43
  And to top that off, the complete Chopin-Gudovsky etudes, and I thought, goodness, she must be pretty amazing to record all of this stuff, but I had no idea about who the pianist was or what the quality of the recordings were like.
• 7:03
  And I just kind of passed this off as a, you know, vanity project or cottage industry, and I just left it at that.
• 7:12
  Then I read an article in Gramophone by my colleague Jeremy Nicholas where he gave an overview of the Joyce Hatto recordings in the January 2006 issue.
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  And he's a very trustworthy critic. He's not one to gush. He's not easily impressed. And he's a very meticulous researcher.
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  And he was just raving about these Joyce Hatto recordings saying that this is one of the greatest pianists I've ever heard.
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  I thought, whoa, what is this? And then I googled Joyce Hatto's name and I found an article from 2005 by Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe.
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  And he was also incredibly effusive about Joyce Hatto. And apparently there was this backstory that she was an active concert pianist and teacher who had been struggling with ovarian cancer for many years, which is why she did not play concerts.
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  But when she felt up to it, she would simply go into the studio and record complete Beethoven and Chopin and Schubert and Schumann and everybody in all these cycles.
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  And it just seemed kind of incredible, even incredulous, that a pianist in her 70s with serious health problems could be making recordings of such a uniformly high quality and playing things like the Liszt transcendental etudes and the Chopin etudes and the Godofsky etudes at full capacity.
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  And with the energy and accuracy of a much younger and healthier pianist. I mean, this seemed too good to be true, but like I said, what a backstory.
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  So with blessings from the editor of Pianist magazine, Erica Worth, I planned a feature article about Joyce Hatto because I wanted to know about this.
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  You know, anything like this in the piano world, of course, piques my interest.
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  So I contacted the owner of the concert artist label. His name was William Barrington Coop, and he turned out to be Joyce Hatto's husband.
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  I did not know that he had a rather shady past in the record industry.
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  But anyway, I contacted him and he sent me a sampler CD with all kinds of various selections by Joyce Hatto.
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  And I was very impressed by the playing. In fact, I was really bowled over by a couple of selections such as the Balakirev Islamé and the Brahms Paganini variations.
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  And then we had subsequent email and telephone exchanges and they could not have been more collegial and friendly.
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  And he even arranged for me to speak to Joyce Hatto by phone in late March of 2006.
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  She was vivacious, funny, upbeat and extremely talkative during our interview.
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  But I couldn't really take this as an interview because it was more of a bonding session because it was very hard to get straightforward answers from her.
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  I mean, her mind was just flitting all over the place. But I thought at least this is a good way to make contact.
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  And then later on I can do a really serious focused interview and try to get her to answer my questions.
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  But that never happened because three months later, Joyce Hatto died.
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  Barrington Coop sent me a couple of Joyce Hatto discs in the mail after she died.
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  One was the Liszt Transcendental Etudes and the other was Iberia of Albaines.
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  And I reviewed both of them for ClassicsToday.com.
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  My editor at Classics Today, David Hurwitz, also became interested in the Joyce Hatto recordings on my recommendation.
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  And he said, just review the best ones that you find.
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  I even met William Barrington Coop in person when I was in London in October of 2006.
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  And I interviewed him for about two hours, I think.
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  He could not have been more charming. And he gave me some more Joyce Hatto CDs to take home.
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  So fast forward to Tuesday, February 13th, 2007.
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  I had just started to transcribe my interview with Barrington Coop on that day and getting this article about Joyce Hatto started.
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  When I received an email from a ClassicsToday.com reader, Brian Ventura,
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  he purchased Hatto's Liszt Transcendental Etudes on my recommendation.
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  But when he attempted to transfer the disc to his computer using iTunes,
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  the track listing revealed Laszlo Simon's recording of the etudes on the Beast label rather than a Joyce Hatto recording.
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  And then he compared the Hatto CD he had to sample tracks of the Laszlo Simon posted on Amazon.com.
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  And to his ears, the Hatto and Simon discs sounded identical.
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  Now, while I don't necessarily consider the iTunes Grey's Note database a reliable source of identity,
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  I could not let Brian Ventura's claim go by. So I decided to investigate for myself.
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  I happened to have had the Laszlo Simon Liszt disc in my collection.
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  So I started to do comparisons going back and forth between the Joyce Hatto and the Laszlo Simon.
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  I did this for, I guess, about an hour.
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  And to my ears, 10 out of the 12 tracks showed remarkable similarity in terms of tempi and accents and dynamics and balances and other pianistic niceties.
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  But by contrast, the fifth etude, Fou Fillet, sounded markedly different between the two sources.
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  The final etude also seemed as if the performances were different in certain aspects, although it was harder for me to tell.
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  And maybe my ears were just getting tired after all of that comparative listening.
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  But there was one little factor that made me suspicious, that made me smell a rat.
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  And that was in etude number 10, the C natural above middle C was slightly out of tune in the Laszlo Simon recording.
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  And it was also slightly out of tune in the Joyce Hatto recording, the very same note and the very same piece out of tune in both recordings.
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  So I thought, hmm, maybe Brian Ventura is on to something.
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  So I looked at the vast pile of unopened Joyce Hatto CDs on my floor.
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  See, I had no room on the shelves. They were all sitting in the corner of the floor.
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  So I opened up the disc containing the Rachmaninoff second and third concertos with Joyce Hatto.
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  I loaded the CD into my laptop's disk drive and the iTunes grace note database came up with these concertos.
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  The works were correct.
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  But it said that the performances were by pianist Yafim Bronfman and Esa Pekka Salonen conducting on Sony Classics.
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  Now, fortunately, I had the Bronfman CD also in my collection.
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  So within a minute, I could tell that the Bronfman and the Hatto Rachmaninoff performances were identical.
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  So I wrote back to Brian Ventura and I reported what I had just found out.
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  I told him about what I had found about the Liszt and the out of tune C natural and what I had discovered about the Rachmaninoff discs.
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  And I wrote a similar email to David Hurwitz and to James Invern, who at the time was the editor of Gramophone.
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  And then I wrote to William Barrington Coop and he quickly replied claiming not to have known what happened.
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  And he claimed to have been as puzzled as I was.
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  So then James Invern's suggestion, the recording engineer Andrew Rose, who runs Pristine Classical, contacted me.
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  And he asked me to send him sound files from both the Joyce Hatto and the Laszlo Simon CDs because he could look at the files because no two sound files look alike, you know, just like fingerprints.
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  So Andrew Rose concluded that the Joyce Hatto and Laszlo Simon Liszt Transcendental Etudes were completely identical except for Fufferle.
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  And the Fufferle was actually taken from the pianist Minoru Nojima's recording on reference recordings on that label.
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  So I was wrong about the 12th Etude.
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  Both performances of that were exactly the same, even though I thought I heard differences.
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  So from there, basically the dam burst and dozens of Joyce Hatto CDs got checked and a good number of them were properly identified.
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  So a few days after this happened, both Brian Ventura and I visited David Hurwitz and we decided to try to identify more Hatto CDs.
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  Dave suggested that I bring over a recording of the Sasson Second Piano Concerto because, first of all, there weren't all that many recordings to choose from and compare.
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  And also when you consider the timpani solo at the outset of the second movement, no two timpani quite sound alike from recording to recording.
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  So I brought in two separate editions of Joyce Hatto playing the second concerto.
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  And these exactly matched the recordings with Jean-Philippe Collard and Andre Previn on EMI.
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  And actually one of my Hatto discs was off pitch, but it was the same performance.
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  And also there was a small studio noise, like a music stand moving or something like that.
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  And that particular noise was common to all of these recordings.
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  And although I did not know it at the time, there were other people investigating Joyce Hatto recordings, suspecting that they were frauds.
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  For example, it was discovered that the sound files for the Joyce Hatto Chopin Mazurkas were exact matches for an issue on the Calliope label featuring the pianist Eugene Injik.
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  Now, what was really amazing, and I would say that this is the genius behind the scandal, was that sometimes William Barrington Coop would take a specific recording
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  and he'd change the tempo without altering the pitch, and then he would monkey around with the sound, like adding reverberation or something like that.
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  And there were a few instances where I thought he actually improved the originals.
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  For example, there were some Rachmaninoff discs that were stolen outright from Ian Hobson's recordings.
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  And by upping the tempos just a tad without changing the pitch and adding just a dash of reverb, the Joyce Hatto versions actually sounded better to my ears.
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  And in one instance, Barrington Coop took a recording of the Brahms Paganini variations by Lillia Silbertstein on the Deutsche Grammophon label as his basic version.
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  And for certain versions that he didn't like, he would substitute other pianists, thereby creating a kind of composite version of the Paganini etudes.
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  And he managed to manipulate the sound so that there was hardly any difference between the different pianists' recordings, sonically speaking.
• 19:56
  I don't know how he did that, but I was totally fooled at the time.
• 20:01
  There's a list on the website of Farhan Malik, who is a musicologist and writer and a scholar who knows everything about the piano.
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  And he created a list that contains all of the Joyce Hatto CDs that he was able to correctly identify.
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  Sometimes he would identify certain tracks on the CD, but others he wouldn't be able to.
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  There still remain recordings that are unidentified to this day.
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  For instance, there's a wonderful disc with the Schubert A major sonata, Deutsch number 664.
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  It's a lovely performance, but I have no idea who's playing.
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  And who did the terrific Brahms-Hendel variations credited to Joyce Hatto?
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  We haven't yet found out, but it's a wonderful recording.
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  Now, what about the different pianists whose recordings William Barrington Koop used?
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  I met one of these pianists once, and he was very angry and indignant, understandably so.
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  But I asked him, is the CD from which they stole selling more copies now in its legitimate incarnation?
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  And he said, oh yeah, I've gotten a lot more attention.
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  And then I said, you know, when all of these CDs under your name were released, no one cared and you couldn't get arrested.
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  Yet in the aftermath of the Joyce Hatto scandal, you've gotten much more attention and publicity for these recordings than you would have ever before.
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  So I would take full advantage of it.
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  And the fact is that William Barrington Koop really made smart choices.
• 21:47
  Of course, he didn't choose instantly recognizable pianists like Glenn Gould.
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  But if you look at that link that I included in my episode description, you will see that Barrington Koop stole from both well-known and lesser-known pianists.
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  Probably the best known of the pianists who he stole from was Vladimir Ashkenazi,
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  because Ashkenazi's recording of the Brahms Second Concerto with Bernard Hytink is represented in the Joyce Hatto catalog.
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  In any event, William Barrington Koop confessed to the hoax and he was never charged.
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  And he died in 2014.
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  I never had any contact with him again after that one email asking him, how come this was happening to all of your recordings?
• 22:38
  In the aftermath of the Joyce Hatto scandal, the pianist Joseph Smith asked me how I felt.
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  And I said, well, of course I was fooled, because as a reviewer, one normally assumes that the disc that is sent to you is performed by the person to whom the performance is credited.
• 22:58
  And to substantiate my point, I will quote from an editorial that David Hurwitz wrote at the outset when the scandal was just starting to unravel.
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  Dave wrote that, I firmly believe that critics who review music based on what they actually hear,
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  rather than what the name of the artist leads them to believe they ought to hear, have little cause for concern.
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  Now, of course, I would sometimes frame my musical observations with sentences that are anecdotal or reflecting a personal bias,
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  such as a sentence like, at 77, it seems improbable that a pianist dealing with ovarian cancer can play the Chopin etudes at full capacity.
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  And of course, it's improbable because it wasn't Joyce Hatto.
• 23:50
  But the important point is that my musical descriptions are as accurate as I can make them.
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  But if you say something like, Joyce Hatto plays in typical British style without citing anything concrete, that's just lazy criticism.
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  In any event, as soon as the scope of the Joyce Hatto scandal became really clear,
• 24:15
  I do have to admit that I started looking through my Joyce Hatto reviews to see if I had actually reviewed the legitimate discs from which the performances were stolen,
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  and to see if I had contradicted myself or shown any kind of prejudice on Joyce Hatto's part.
• 24:37
  And to my great relief, I was pretty consistent.
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  So here's an example. I had reviewed the pianist Paul Kim's recording of Messiaen's The Regas Lofon Jesu for Classics Today years and years back.
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  And I gave it a generally good review, if not exactly a rave.
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  And then I reviewed the Joyce Hatto version years later.
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  And while the reviews were not identical word for word, I mean, how could they have been?
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  My general sentiments were quite similar.
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  And then it turned out that the Joyce Hatto version was stolen from the Paul Kim recording.
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  So I was kind of relieved.
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  Of course, poor Bryce Morrison had given the Yefim Bronfman Rachmaninoff concerto disc that I spoke about before a rather negative reviewing gramophone.
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  But he praised the same performances when they appeared under Joyce Hatto's name.
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  Obviously, that was a little embarrassing on Bryce's part.
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  But, you know, that sort of thing could very well have happened to me.
• 25:48
  But if you go back to read my Joyce Hatto reviews, if you can find them, I stand firmly by my musical observations.
• 25:58
  And over time, I quickly credited the proper pianists for the performances in question as soon as I learned their identities.
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  So, as I said before, I'm including a link to the Mark Singer article in the New Yorker in my episode description,
• 26:18
  as well as a link to my radio show between the Keys episode that I presented about the Joyce Hatto scandal,
• 26:27
  where I featured performances that were once credited to Joyce Hatto.
• 26:31
  But, of course, I properly identify the pianists on this program.
• 26:36
  So, what were some of the most notable releases appropriated by the Joyce Hatto cottage industry?
• 26:46
  I would say the Beethoven sonata cycle with pianist John O'Connor that was on the Tellarck label.
• 26:54
  Certainly the Prokofiev cycle with Oleg Marshev that I spoke about before.
• 26:59
  There was a wonderful Ravel cycle by Roger Muraro or Roger Muraro, which was stolen for Joyce Hatto, and that is terrific.
• 27:10
  And also the Laszlo Simon Liszt transcendental etudes are terrific, and I always continue to recommend that.
• 27:19
  The Beethoven Liszt pastoral symphony in Michel d'Alberto's recording, that was stolen for Joyce Hatto.
• 27:28
  And also the Mozart sonata cycle recorded by Ingrid Hebler for Denon, not her earlier Phillips recording, but the Denon remakes.
• 27:39
  Those were used for Joyce Hatto.
• 27:42
  And there was also an unpublished Scriabin sonata cycle.
• 27:46
  I think only a few copies of this disc were printed, and I happened to have it.
• 27:52
  And those were stolen from Hickon Ostbaugh's recording.
• 27:57
  The Chopin waltzes are wonderful, and those were stolen from Arthur Moreira Lima's recording on the ProArt label.
• 28:05
  And there's a terrific Balakirev Islamé featuring Michel Campanella, but not Joyce Hatto.
• 28:13
  So there you have it, the story of the Joyce Hatto scandal, at least the story from my perspective.
• 28:21
  This is Jed Dissler, and you've been listening to the Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano recordings.
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  And I look forward to being with you next time for the next episode.
• 28:34
  Take care.