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Posted by Alistair Hinton So - who will sue? To date, I can report that two record companies - Altarus and BIS - and two artists - Carlo Grante and Marc-André Hamelin - whose work has allegedly been purloined in this series, have either publicly or privately stated that they will not do so. That still leaves a vast number of as yet not fully identified potentially disaffected artists and record companies who might yet come forward and declare that they either will or won't instigate legal action. Even if, once the evidence of all the sources has been established, everyone involved plays the gentleman and follows the lead of those four, it seems almost inevitable that MCPS/PRS will eventually have to initiate some kind of action whether they like it or not, since they have a legal responsibility both as licensors and to their memberships to uphold copyright law and artists' rights and, if they continue to ignore a case of this magnitude in the face of so much publicly available evidence (whether or not that evidence will stand up in a court of law), they may themselves risk investigation by the Office of Fair Trading for failure of duty. If indeed many or all of these 119 CDs are or can be proved to be fakes - and if, in addition, some of the other non-"Hatto" recordings on the same label are likewise (as is now being suggested as a possibility), the extent of the fraud involved will not be small; in such circusmtances, the motivation remains unclear. This is indeed a very sad case, whatever may be its background - all the more so if Joyce Hatto herself is posthumously proved to have been a conscious party to it all. I had heard none of these recordings until sampling some of the Chopin/Godowsky Study ones earlier this evening. I had heard the "story" and, whilst I won't say I was "taken in" by it as such and I admit to finding it pretty unusual, I was at least prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to some of what was being presented. As the curator of an archive devoted to a composer who was at least as reclusive as Hatto seems to have been and for rather longer, I was naturally not unprepared to countenance the notion that great art can indeed be produced over an extended period of time by someone at a very great arm's length from the milieu of professional music-making. I did, however, find some odd unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions. To begin with, the assertion that Hatto had been the first pianist ever to perform the complete Beethoven/Liszt Symphonies and that she gave their world première broadcast on the BBC Third Programme during the 1950s in a production by Humphrey Searle seemed not to stand up; Humphrey never mentioned her, or this event, to me during the three years when I studied with him but, perhaps more importantly, there's no reference to this major coup in his memoire Quadrille with a Raven, despite ample coverage there of his other BBC production and Lisztian activities around that time (and we know where those memoirs are published, do we not?!). Secondly, neither Ronald Smith nor John Ogdon ever mentioned her either in my hearing or to anyone that I know who knew them. Sorabji himself had retired as a professional critic by the time that Hatto's career, such as it really was, began to take off, yet one might reasonably have assumed that his frequent plugging of Bax's Symphonic Variations (as one of the finest piano and orchestra works by a British composer) would have led him at some point to mention to me the pianist credited with its first complete performance (but he never did - and her name is not known to feature once in his collected published writings). Lstly, whilst it is not entirely impossible, the prospect that anyone - let alone someone capable of producing some 160 CDs - could survive a serious cancer for almost four decades seems to me to be at the outer edges of credibility. We will just have to see what happens and when. There is no point in being holier or cleverer than thou by carping at critics for not having noticed this and that, except perhaps in those relatively few cases where some had duped themsleves into praising the "Hatto" version of something while having damned its genuine original, or vice versa. Nor is there much point in moralising, for if a widespread fraud has indeed been committed, that is a legal matter and may, if pursued, have to be subject to the due process of law; we should surely therefore wait until that process has been instigated, conducted and completed before any of us tries to pre-empt what a high court judge and as many good men-and-women and true as can be found (or possibly subpoenaed) to participate on a jury (I'm already up for playing the prior bias card to excuse me from that one) have decided (assuming that a conclusive final decision can be reached). In the meantime, The Man who may have Mistook his Hatto for a Wife (with due apologies both to Michael Nyman and to everyone here for that tasteless remark, for which the best excuse I can come up with right now is "tatesless is as tasteless does") has probably got a lot of thinking either to do or to resolve to continue not to do... Best, Alistair
on February 21, 2007, 12:49 am, in reply to "Re: Hatto? Ha!"
88.106.247.27
Well, the current evidence is that William Barrington-Coupe seems still to be standing by the absolute authenticity of all the 119 Hatto CDs so far released on his label (and, presumably by implication, all the others that are supposedly awaiting release, not least Alkan's complete Opp. 35 & 39 and the Grande Sonate) and is even promising to continue with the release schedule. Unless and until he is charged with some criminal activity, there is nothing to stop him from continuing to claim that all these recordings are of Hatto's performances and to issue more of the "same", unless the rapidly mounting international publicity discourages him from either (which is seemingly not yet the case).
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