JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

Robert Cottrell — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:11:20 +0000

STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE

Rod Williams investigates the biggest fraud in the history of recorded music--the story of how the husband of a dying British classical pianist fooled the critical establishment into acclaiming his wife, Joyce Hatto, as a genius ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007; with a postscript

In January 2003 the Yahoo! great-pianists group posted an MP3 file of Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz” played by a little-known English pianist called Joyce Hatto. The web forum put up only a 30-second extract. Even so, the group’s pianophiles, who obsessively compare notes on classical recordings, were captivated--and not only by the playing, but also by the player.

Joyce Hatto had retired from the concert platform in 1976, but a quarter of a century later, in her 70s and suffering from terminal cancer, she had toiled in the recording studio in an amazing burst of creative energy. Her discography was remarkable both for its size--at 103 discs, her output made her probably the most prolific pianist in history--but also for the matchless range of her repertoire. She had mastered the complete sonata cycles of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Prokofiev; concertos by Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mendelssohn; and all 53 of Godowsky’s transcriptions of the Chopin Etudes, the most impossibly difficult pieces ever written for the piano. read more »

hattogate

JOYCE HATTO: THE GREAT PIANO SWINDLE

STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE

Rod Williams investigates the biggest fraud in the history of recorded music--the story of how the husband of a dying British classical pianist fooled the critical establishment into acclaiming his wife, Joyce Hatto, as a genius ...