AudioMasters

Rumours have abounded that cult British pianist, the late Joyce Hatto, might not be all she appeared. Investigations I've carried out in conjunction with Gramophone magazine appear to prove without doubt that her CDs are actually doctored copies of other performers' recordings.

With about 100 CDs to her name, and increasing rave reviews, it's bound to rock the world of classical music.

Read Gramophone's breaking news story here (http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?storyID=2759&newssectionID=1)

then hear the evidence we present here (http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html).

It's been a remarkable week!

P.S. Never try to time stretch a piano track by over 15% - it simply doesn't sound right... :-o

So how were the tracks identified correctly in itunes to begin with?  Were they actually foolish enough to leave the cd text from the original intact?  Bad to enough to plagiarize, worse to not be very good at concealing it.   :-o
JTC

As I understand it a reviewer popped a Hatto CD in his PC and iTunes suggested it was something else, I presume simply through track durations. The fact that the music matched but the performer didn't raised alarm bells - even though the reviewer in question had previously praised Hatto in a number of erudite publications both in the UK and US...

Hmm... several years ago I went to a lot of trouble to step-enter a large chunk of Chopin mazurka that I can't play into a MIDI sequencer, just so that we could use it in a video production without paying any copyright for using somebody else's recording. Yes, it sounded like a machine was playing it, but hey, it saved a lot of money and that was more important than any artistic niceties at the time.

And now I realise where I went wrong. I should  have used a famous recording with a pitch-shift, and pretended to be William Barrington-Coupe, claiming that my wife had played it.

What's the chances of every recording made that he claims to be her turning out to be somebody else manipulated slightly? Probably find that she couldn't even play chopsticks!

Heh - those involved in classical music recording these days (eg me) are all involved in the 'fraud' of digital editing but this is going rather further, and of course involves the theft of copyright material - which may be pursued by those involved.

However, I suspect a rather sad story may lie behind this.  Perhaps the husband was trying to bolster the wife's reputation for other than straight financial gain during her sickness.  Or they were up to some kind of revenge on the critics or something?  I'm just surprised that it went unproven for so long.

Interesting stuff in http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2006/Jan06/Hatto2_recordings.htm - the fawning writer seeks to understand how she could have recorded what was claimed.  Even he says that there was a marked change of personality in her later recordings...

From her Guardian obit - "Unlike most artists, her discs are not performances patched together from a number of takes."  Apparently not...

http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classRev/2007/Jan07/Mozart_sonatas_Hatto_IP001052.htm refers to some Mozart CDs of hers being "re-edited and remastered" using newly recorded material.  One wonders what that was about.

From a review of her complete Ravel piano works - apparently recorded over a two day period - "The late Joyce Hatto recorded Ravel's complete piano works over a period of two days in May 2005, when she was 76. No allowances need to be made for age or ill health, because Hatto sounds like a stripling half her age, on prime technical and musical form."

Lastly, you'll love this discussion of Joyce Hatto's prowess in the Godowsky recording which started a couple of days ago amongst participants unaware of her exposure - http://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?PHPSESSID=715717e3d1ee868b61e4088d414ab4ad&topic=19312.new - like watching a group of people heading towards a banana skin...

It's only a fraud if you claim that you haven't edited it, surely? And this is 'passing off' - a whole different ball game.


Interesting ideas - but how does attempting to bolster her reputation do any good? She would be the only real beneficiary in the short term, and long term discovery will inevitably damage what reputation she had - not much of one anyway, it would seem. She (apparently) stopped playing in public 25 years ago. Do you recall hearing anything about her at the time? I don't (not that this necessarily proves anything, of course). The whole sordid episode puts me in mind of a variation on the 'repainting old masters' scam - only the other way around.

Strikes me that William Barrington-Coupe should have learned something about the persistence of ID3 tags and subcode information before doing anything as foolhardy as he did. When it comes to faking, this bloke is an amateur. I could prove this quite easily by doing a decent fake job of almost anything - and it would be far harder to spot unless I admitted to it. Want the proof? Ask MarkT about singing...

Well somebody (you?) has dumped the banana skin in the thread now, of course. From here on, this should make fascinating reading!

Heh, the beans had been spilled when first I saw it - I rather suspect there will be a sudden silence, especially from the guy who was so assertive about her prowess.

Reading her bio material and interviews does make me very surprised that she'd knowingly be involved in what went on, though it is hard to believe she had no idea.   It does indeed mean that her own achievements - which I suspect were quite solid in years gone by - will now be forgotten.

I've racked my brains but can't recall coming across her at Wigmore Hall or whatever.  It would however be interesting to find a genuine recording in my archive!  I might have a search later but I doubt it.

But there is a general prejudice against women - British - pianists.  When you think of all the Proms appearances by Moura Lympany, even late in her life, and her great popularity as a performer, you'd think that some mention of her passing would have been found on the BBC News site - but no, only pop performers seems to get a mention there.

Google reveals that William Barrington-Coupe founded a record label with Joe Meek in 1960.  The same W B-C who is under a cloud concerning this hoax I wonder??  Not that it matters of course...

"In 1960, Meek set up Triumph Records, with classical record producer William Barrington-Coupe. Meek and Barrington-Coupe each owned half, and Meek had full creative control. Recordings from this period include "Angela Jones" and "I See a New World". However, this collapsed after problems with distribution, leaving a number of records unreleased, including the first single by a young actor-turned-singer, John Leyton."

Interesting. I wonder if Ted Fletcher (Alice, JoeMeek, TFPro and the mic preamps on my E-mu 1820m)  knows anything about this guy? This was around the time he was working for Meek, I believe. Might try to find out...

The Grauniad obit was quite interesting though. If it's not a complete hoax too, she must have had some talent...

I see at least one person has joined that thread refusing to believe that she was a hoax.  His argument is that, in terms of musical interpretation he can HEAR that Hatto is different and superior to the people she is supposed to have copied.

At the risk of being cruel, I wish I had his address.  I have some expensive audio leads I'd like to sell him too!

Bob

Others are now analysing the recordings - see http://www.dasdc.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8631&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Also the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_cover.html

It appears he has now seen the light...

Assuming that the EMI session information is correct, and independently corroborates that she did indeed record the Bax in 1970, it's looking increasingly likely that the pedigree of anything issued with her name on it after that time should not be taken at face value. Incidentally, I asked my father, who is old enough and has spent enough time with enough piano music, musicians and the RCM to have a pretty good idea of who was really who in the world of UK piano playing throughout the 20th century whether he has ever heard of Hatto, and she rings no bells with him at all. And I don't think that there's much he missed, one way or another.

The real embarrassment must be for all those people who didn't spot this hoax years ago though...

Methinks it may rather be that he has felt the heat...

The archives of Wigmore Hall would quickly reveal whether or not she did play there at the period stated.

The existence of the conductor of the orchestra used on some of her recordings has, however, very much come up for debate - try googling for René Köhler and you only come up with the Joyce Hatto association (or a Rolls Royce one!).

I'll say this though - assuming that she did live and die and perform at the dates stated - in another forum Andrew has commented to the effect that he finds it difficult to believe that she was not a party to the hoax.  Well, I can actually imagine circumstances where she could well not have known.  Assuming that she did record the works, it's possible that they were authentically edited and approved by her, and that the substitution took place at the duplication stage - and I've seen it suggested that the duplication was in-house to order.  Any copies of the recording around the house could well have been the authentic ones.  And if she went round to friends, you don't normally say to a visiting musician "Hi Joyce, let's settle down and listen to one of your recordings".  Musicians I have worked with seem to have little interest in their own recordings once complete - they usually regret them, even when brilliantly performed!  So - let's give this deceased soul the benefit of the doubt and see what's proven about who is actually responsible for this.  The husband has issued denials in emails in the last 24 hours apparently (in response to angry customers who paid large sums for individual CDs!).

I very much got the impression that this may well have had nothing to do with her directly - and we'll never know anyway unless she has recorded her thoughts about this anywhere, and this seems pretty unlikely. I'm pretty sure that all the accusations are pointing in one direction - and it's not  towards her...

As a postscript, I've just read through an interesting interview (http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Mar03/Hatto.htm) with Hatto about her touring life around Europe. It's gloriously out of context of course, but at one point the interviewer asks:

"And nothing ever went wrong in these eastern tours?" and back comes the answer -

"No the only time things ever went wrong was when I was travelling with my husband!"

So no change there, then...  :roll:

Andrew - great investigation of an ubelieveable hoax - I never heard of her, but it seems from the links which were provided here, that "her" recordings gained a lot of popularity among some listeners.

It is really strange than nobody investigated this seriously before. I mean, all these doubts of how the elderly ill lady could have recorded so much, these wrong track names - or rather right track names with wrong performer names - popping up in the Windows Media Players or foobars of numerous people, finally, a conductor no one has ever heard of, an "ad-hoc" orchestra which recorded only with Hatto and Köhler for 7 or 8 years, and never with anyone else. I am also pretty sure that never there was  anything called Warsaw Philharmonia Orchestra.  And I doubt that an "ad-hoc" Polish orchestra would be hired to travel to the UK and record there in 1994 - 10 years before Poland joined the EU and Poles could work in the UK without getting special permits, etc. The logistics required for such operation would be a great burden for a small record company.

There are also some inconsitencies in René Köhler's biography posted here (http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2006/Jan06/Hatto2_recordings.htm) but supposedly provided by William Barrington-Coupe.

It seems unlikely that "he briefly continued studying music at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow" - since 1888 Krakow has had a Conservatoire (since 1979 called Academy of Music), separate from the Jagiellonian University. The Jagiellonian University had at this time only a small sub-department of History and Theory of Music - that is, he could maybe study musicology at the University, rather than music. A musician would study at the Conservatoire.
Next, it is highly unlikely that he "unable to join the [Warsaw] Conservatoire because of his Jewish faith" - I have no knowledge of such restrictions, and I was able to find at least two musicians of Jewish origin who studied in Warsaw Conservatoire in the 1930s.

Oh, Andrew, there is a small mistake on your page on the Hatto Hoax. It says:
Left channel = 'Joyce Hatto' - Right channel = Carlo Grante
Altarus CD, 1995
Simon [instead of Grante] recording has been time-shrunk by 15.112%

Thanks for spotting the page error - as you might guess, it's been cobbled together as evidence came to light and chopped and changed accordingly.

As for Hatto not knowing about this - it's hard to explain how they managed to record her with a complete symphony orchestra in their home studio, or in a non-existent church in London. She must have noticed all those musicians crammed into her living room! But she did apparently talk about these sessions as if they'd happened - assuming the 'real' Joyce Hatto was the person on the other end of the phone interviews and e-mails....

Indeed, Andrew, that does take some explaining...  what a fascinating business.  Meryl Streep is apparently going to take the lead role in the movie, so I read somewhere on the net.

Can I play myself and have a romantic liaison? I know it's stretching the story a bit, but hey... :-D

INT. DAY:  PRISTINE AUDIO CONTROL ROOM

Andrew is sitting at the controls of his Audition PC, staring intently at the screen, hitting keys on the keyboard.  Behind him stands his beautiful assistant, Fifi. 

                   ANDREW

Stretching....stretching....a bit more...almost got it...almost got it....YES!  They're identical!  This is the proof we needed!


                   FIFI

You mean....?


                  ANDREW

Yes.  All our work is vindicated.  We've proven that Joyce Hatto is a fake!  SteveG and Ozpeter will HAVE to respect me now!


                   FIFI

That's wonderful.  Andrew, you're going to be......famous....

Her words tail off as their eyes meet.  A look passes between them and FIFI takes off her black, horn-rim glasses and shakes her hair out of the tight bun she normally wears.  She begins to slowly unbutton her lab coat.  Andrew looks scared at first, then reaches for his keyboard and punches a key.  The screen display changes and the camera zooms into a close shot of the Audition phase analysis display (the rude one) pulsing wildly.


                 CUT TO:

INT DAY

BFM is trying to make M-Audio drivers work with Windows Vista.....

:)

Bob

(running for the door)

Joking aside, I just listened to the 6PM news on BBC Radio 4 and, just after a quarter past the hour, they did an extensive feature on the Joyce Hatto story, including an interview with Andrew Rose!

Congratulations!

Bob

Andrew, you're famous!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/16/news/hatto.php
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/17/npianist17.xml
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1398283.ece
http://www.classicstoday.com/Classics/ConcertReview_ASPFiles/ViewConcertReview.asp?Action=User&ID=533
http://www.stereophile.com/news/021907hatto/
http://hiperhip.blogspot.com/2007/02/strange-story.html

Get ready to meet Meryl Streep

And...until 6PM tomorrow at least...you can listen to Andrew on the BBC News.

Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/ and in the right hand column select "listen to the latest 6PM bulletin".  If you use the controls on the player screen, fast forwarding by 15 minutes takes you almost exactly to the start of the story.

Bob

It's not going to last too long, so I've taken the liberty (under the 'extracts' rule, and I don't think they'd mind) of extracting just the relevant bit, which some people might find easier to play anyway.

I've been away from the forum for a few days, and I'm not particularly familiar with the classical music world anyway.  But has anyone else mentioned yet how the name of the record label may hold a hint: Concert Artist?

Thanks, SteveG, but the supposed interview with Andrew is clearly a hoax.  In real life he's got a strong Welsh accent.

 :evil:

Do you think that I could correct that with HarBal?  :mrgreen:

They faked my phone interview with R4's Front Row later the same evening as well:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/

 8-)

Apparently you got it wrong, Andrew - this comes from the Gramophone statement, now updated:-

"Update, February 20
In a private e-mail to one of our critics, William Barrington-Coupe has refuted any accusations of wrongdoing – adding that a friend of his had compared the Bronfman and Hatto Rachmaninovs and thought the Hatto far superior. Barrington-Coupe also, the critic reported to Gramophone, asserted that Hatto had made the Godowsky recording using her own hand-prepared copies of the scores made when she was 16. He further identified recording venues used for the recordings as mainly colleges and churches where he used mobile recording facilities. He stated his intention to have his own sound engineer prepare his own comparisons. "

Well, that clearly settles the whole matter.  Of course.

Heh, I see now that I revisit Andrew's site - now much updated - that the UK Daily Telegraph has interviewed Mr Barrington-Coupe - see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/20/npiano20.xml - in the face of all the mounting evidence it is hard to see how he can deny that something is more than somewhat odd about these recordings, but I guess he either denies it or lies down under a possible weight of oncoming lawsuits.

The Telegraph wrote:


Just what sort of a buffoon is this? Of course you could make any recording the same length as any other one. It's the fact that everything else falls into place in exactly the same way when you do it that's a bit of a giveaway, isn't it?

And what the hell does he mean by 'not proven'? What would he actually regard as 'proven' in this case? He's well out of order, because I'm pretty sure that Andrew's evidence would stand up in a court. And hopefully it will come to that, because he really shouldn't be allowed not only to get away with it, but also to compound the felony by not admitting to it. Just as a matter of principle, Barrington-Coupe's behaviour is beginning to hack me off somewhat, I must say. The Telegraph went on to say:


I think he must have taken some legal advice here - but if this isn't tantamount to an admission of guilt, I don't know what is.

Somebody should explain to Mr. Barrington-Coupe that, when stuck in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging!

Bob

Why none of the critics discovered the hoax earlier? They shoul;d really know and remeber recordings, not rely on CDDB... OK, they probably listen to 10 CDs a day and they might forget.

But why didn't people who have relatively small CD collections did not discover that? I mean, if you have one or two CDs of a given work, you know them by heart. So if you happen to have a "Hatto's recording" you should get suspicious immediately after you hear the original of the recording.  Why hasn't this happen for years?

And another thing that came to my mind: is there any evidence that Hatto died in 2006, not a quarter of century earlier?

I don't know, but that would be independently verifiable - it has to be a matter of public record.

I have to say, this was my very first thought when I first heard about the controversy.  These 'experts' are not as clued-up as they might like us to think they are.

When you look, for example, at the possible source of the Chopin Etudes, and find around 500 recordings in the 2005 UK catalogue alone (the most recent I have to hand) your heart sinks. It's also something you take at face value - if you pick up a CD by The Beatles you don't immediately suspect it of being a fake Rolling Stones album, after all.

Looking most recently at a recording on behalf of Hyperion, I noted the following alterations:

1 - L-R channels reversed
2 - Time shifted to make it 2.36% faster
3 - Re-equalised, lifting bass and lower mids, dropping treble
4 - Possible compression, though we have detected gain riding in other recordings

This is a single track in a disc of multiple origins, following another which had been speeded up by 15%. To expect critics to pick up on this one, which is one of the few with little possible source material, is perhaps hard going on them.

Meanwhile I gather the more straight lifts, such as the 1982 Ashkenazy Brahms Concerto, were amongst the very first 'Hatto' CDs of the current crop, and fell quite possibly below the reviewers' collective radar.

I agree that heavily modified versions might have been difficult to be revealed just by ear.  I meant rather these simple transfers. And you're right, there are hundreds or thousands of recording of popular pieces.  But there also probably tens or hundreds of thousands (or more) people with access to Hatto discs.  I am not saying you're wrong with your analyses, I'm sure you're right. I am just wondering why something like I described above (a detection of a recording known by somebody very well) has not happened earlier. 

I am pretty sure that there are at least a few recordings in my collections which I listened to so many times, that I'd get very suspicious if somebody presented them to me under different name. But maybe I'm wrong!

Well, in view of what we know of the distribution of these discs, I'm not so sure about that. I don't own any, but I rather get the impression that these have been kept out of the hands of a major disk plant. I wonder why?

.
The whole thing is a Hoax. I mean... the Story of a Hoax must be a Hoax.
 
After all, when I check the entertainment news on this side of the Pond, (CBS, CNN, etc),
clearly the only thing really happening is that Britney just checked out of Re-Hab AGAIN!  :roll:

P.S.  What's classical Music??
.

Congratulations, Andrew, on the kind of publicity that money can't buy!  (Cool for Audition, too.)  I can't ever remember hearing of Hatto as a piano performance major in college, and of course you won't find her in the New Grove Dictionary (2nd ed) or Baker's -- but all the artists ripped off in her name are!  Steve, thanks for capturing that clip so the rest of us could hear Andrew, and Bobby, thanks for a script that puts to shame what the Academy will be honoring on Sunday!

I've actually got a (better quality) recording of the Front Row interview too, but it's rather longer and unless I cleared it somehow, I think it would be a copyright breach to post it. If anybody wants to listen to it for private study purposes, I can email it to them; I think that it will remain available on the Radio4 website for a few days, as well. This does suppose that you actually want to listen to Andrew on a ropey old telephone link...

Well since the previous posting it's all exploded all over again - both with Barrington-Coupe's "sort-of" confession, and with the French media getting wind of my location.

If you'd like to see me struggling to explain this in French, this was the TV report a couple of nights ago - regional initially, but picked up the following day on national TV. The report begins about 1'10" into the programme:

http://tinyurl.com/23x28p

Then click on Mardi 27 Février - it's there for a week, so once it falls off the bottom of the list the media will be no longer available.

My favourite version of the 'confession' is this one (http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s4i15549)...

I rather like the "Le Pot aux Roses" graphic at the beginning!

Bob

I didn't know this one until a couple of French papers used it in their headlines, as well as the TV people - "découvrir le pot aux roses", according to my Harraps dictionary, "to uncover the secret"...

Very appropriate, Monsieur Rose!

 :-D

Bob

In http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1466154.ece Mr Barrington-Coupe reveals that the editing of others' performances into those of his wife was achieved on a minidisc.

Indeed, you can achieve remarkable results that way.  But this doesn't quite explain the time stretching etc.  Nor have I seen any explanation of the orchestral recordings - difficult still to understand how Joyce Hatto remained in ignorant innocence of those.

I think something other than the audio is still being stretched.   I doubt whether the whole truth will ever be known.

You're not kidding. The man is a convicted fraudster, for heavens sake. Nothing he's said so far convinces me of anything about this at all - other than that he's a fraudster!

The other reason that I don't attach any particular credence to any of these reports is that they are created by journalists, and they are, from my own personal experience, experts at making mistakes, sometimes wilfully.  In the one referred to above, for instance:


Are you still on a retainer, Andrew?

Andrew turned up on my iPod yesterday  :-o, in a segment on NPR.

The more I think about it, the less plausible I find any of what Barrington-Coupe says and does to be. For instance:


Oh yes he can - he puts them symbolically on the piano stool for when interviewers from whom he wishes to elicit sympathy turn up. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he insisted that it was a woman reporter that interviewed him, and that's not being sexist in the slightest on my part - it would have been coldly calculated on his. In fact that whole scene in the music room sounds totally contrived.

How about this bit, though?

So she knew about this then? Doesn't half sound like it...


I think he's got that back to front. All it makes me feel is that my original supposition about how much he's plagiarised (everything for which there is no corroborating evidence) is correct. If he wants to be left alone to rot in peace, he would be better off confessing the full extent of it now. The less he admits, the less anybody will think of him, I'm pretty sure. I don't want him to kill himself at all - that would be too easy a cop-out. I want him to have to live with this very publically for a long time, and save everybody else a lot of quite unnecessary hard work.

Barrington-Coupe is like any other cornered rat - he will do anything at all to escape from the hole he's in. Nothing that leaves his lips, unless corroborated, is to be trusted in the slightest, especially if it's been mediated by a journalist - he can see them coming. He should be sued, and bankrupted - proper sackcloth and ashes job.

On a technical level, it should be quite easy to disprove any stories about minidiscs, incidentally. And where's the evidence that he had even the basic equipment to make good recordings in his home? He claims to have been able to insert missing notes, editing with a minidisc recorder? Who's he trying to kid?  I've actually tried doing this - his claims about being able to do this are baseless.

For an example of bad journalism how about this:


What does she expect a conman to look like...a conman? duh! :roll:

My personal definiton of a journalist is: a person who is paid for writing on topics he or she has no slightest clue about. 

That article is one of the worst examples of journalism I've seen so far in this story, though it has to be said, when you stack up the British press against just about all the rest they come out very poorly indeed - lack of research, lack of understanding, lack of basic thought, and ready to swallow anything they're fed.

Perhaps British newspaper journalists are just thick - the day after the story broke I took eight calls from two Mail on Sunday journalists, going over the same thing time and time again as you might when talking to a small child - and when their story finally came out 9 days later it was still crap. The Telegraph journalist who called the same day got the basics right, but then wrote the first Barrington-Coupe interview (where he denied everything - a shamefully poor example of journalism that) without question. Whilst I've done lengthy interviews for American, Canadian, French, Finnish, German, and Icelandic journalists, some of it purely for background and fact-checking, the British press has often simply reprinted the errors from each other's stories - or introduced new ones - and shown very little interest in getting off their bums and doing any real work.

The Sunday Times article, then parroted by AP and thus distributed around the world, is simply another example of this attitude.

Looking first at the reference to me: "a BBC sound engineer" - no, not for 3 years - it would be nice to give my company the proper credit. You might as well say "a schoolboy from Worcestershire" and credit my high school. "...tested sample tracks of Hatto and Simon and discovered two were the exactly the same and another had been doctored" - wrong again, as even the most basic reading of our site, or even easier, picking up the phone, would have told her.

Elsewhere: "Barrington-Coupe looks an unlikely conman" - surely this is the first requirement for conning people. "With his wild grey hair and mournful tone, he exudes the air of a retired music master who doesn’t quite know what to do with himself since the death of his beloved wife" - well he's had a couple of weeks to brush on this particular act, hasn't he? "Hatto’s Steinway piano, which once belonged to Rachmaninov" - I find that very hard to believe; this was part of the Hatto myth spun around the faked CDs. "On the floor lie piles of her CDs, spilling out of boxes, still in their wrappers" - a) they're not hers, b) a few days earlier he said he'd destroyed them all.

"On the piano stool sits a box containing Joyce’s ashes" - goodness me, he's really going for the heartstrings here. Maybe they were - I bet she didn't look to check! But it's all about the sympathy story, isn't it? "Always a perfectionist, Joyce Hatto sat here at the Steinway trying to achieve two notes in a piano transcription of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony that sound, says Bar-rington-Coupe, like a cuckoo. “Several hours passed. I’d been shopping and made tea, and I said to her, ‘How much longer are you going to be play-ing?’ On her 49th go she said, ‘That’s what I’ve been wanting.’ And the birds in the garden all began to sing!”" - unbelievable - literally! Makes the sleevenotes about mythical conductor René Köhler sound convincing.

I could go on, but it;'s just too easy.

OK, guys, Hands up - who thinks they could take two different recordings of, say, something complex by Liszt, played by two different pianists in two different studios with two different mics on two different pianos, and start dropping sections of one into the other, using a MiniDisc, without it being a) crap and b) about as obvious as an elephant in a kindergarten? Come to think of it, how many of us could manage it convincingly - undetectable on good headphones to trained ears - after hours or days of mucking about with EQ, reverb, FSE, adjusting stereo placement, compression, whatever?

The only thing that says to me is that he didn't actually do it himself - he got someone else to do the studio work. Either that or he's still convinced of the continuing total stupidity and gullibility of the average British journalist and their willingness to believe anything and everything the old fraudster comes out with...

I suppose that it's not too surprising that Andrew is even more annoyed about this than I am... and for a lot of the same reasons!  :-D

Journalists actually make some of this stuff up from scratch, to support some of the rather flimsy ideas and suppositions they pick out of the air. I have several examples - and that's just the ones relating to me. I'm pretty sure that they do this to everybody, and I'm also pretty sure that the British press may well be the worst offenders. The worst of it of course is that most of it is willful - they deliberately distort and fabricate just to make stuff more sensational - it's not just stupidity and laziness, although this is undeniably a large part of it.

It seems that last month New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/17/070917fa_fact_singer) did an extensive review of this story.