Joyce Hatto hoax

[David Ayers]

Regarding Tom's point on blind tests etc., that is not the point. The critics who backed Hatto responded with ignorant bluster to the many people who pointed out the discrepancies of style, instrument and venue. [...] Incidentally, these dunces have continued in the same vein, by reproducing hubby's further lies about how his wife knew nothing, he did it for love, it started with just patching, etc - all quite obviously total lies but the press just trotted it all out.

Maybe I haven't followed it closely enough. Is every critic who gave Hatto a favorable review now behaving this way? Or is the anger against a particular set of critics who are refusing to eat humble pie? Or were there only those few to begin with?

The Gramophone put out Barrington-Coupe's version which significantly softens the reality. They were pushing Hatto even when the doubts were in full flow, and one of their reviewers Jeremy Nicholas published a letter saying that anyone with doubts must supply evidence that would 'stand up in a court of law' that the recordings were not genuine, or keep quiet. To me that is fatuous bluster, where the intelligent and honest thing to do would have been to take the reservations seriously. Personally I never for one moment believed in the things that Nicholas and his ilk were saying (greatest recorded legacy since Richter etc) and found it bizarre that inconsistencies noticeable to the naked ear (as reported by others - I never got pulled in) were just brushed off by 'experts' (Nicholas, Jed Distler, Bryce Morrison). The Gramophone's ringing endorsement of Hatto supplied the copy text for all the obituaries (Nicholas spewed it all out again in The Guardian, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, ). These guys should fall on their swords but are out in force defending their gullibility. IMO they should apologise and then vanish.

I'll add that the claim that these records are great has been often repeated to defend the offending critics, but in fact few have heard them (except for the famous concerto recordings by Ashkenazy, Bronfman et al) so it is not at all clear that these really are great recordings. In any case the critics defence has been that they were picked for their anonymity - hardly a sign of greatness. I also wonder how many of these recordings the admiring critics ever actually heard, and ever possessed in other than CD-R or white label form. They have repeated that there are 120 CDs in this 'great legacy' but have they actually worked through them all? I suggest not.

I'll stop now, except to say that my attempt to add a very mildly worded query about the role of critics in the Hatto fiasco to the Gramophone website was censored. That is why I am not impressed by their continued manipulation of the news.

Edited March 5, 2007 by David Ayers

[Larry Kart]

Regarding Tom's point on blind tests etc., that is not the point. The critics who backed Hatto responded with ignorant bluster to the many people who pointed out the discrepancies of style, instrument and venue. [...] Incidentally, these dunces have continued in the same vein, by reproducing hubby's further lies about how his wife knew nothing, he did it for love, it started with just patching, etc - all quite obviously total lies but the press just trotted it all out.

Maybe I haven't followed it closely enough. Is every critic who gave Hatto a favorable review now behaving this way? Or is the anger against a particular set of critics who are refusing to eat humble pie? Or were there only those few to begin with?

The Gramophone put out Barrington-Coupe's version which significantly softens the reality. They were pushing Hatto even when the doubts were in full flow, and one of their reviewers Jeremy Nicholas published a letter saying that anyone with doubts must supply evidence that would 'stand up in a court of law' that the recordings were not genuine, or keep quiet. To me that is fatuous bluster, where the intelligent and honest thing to do would have been to take the reservations seriously. Personally I never for one moment believed in the things that Nicholas and his ilk were saying (greatest recorded legacy since Richter etc) and found it bizarre that inconsistencies noticeable to the naked ear (as reported by others - I never got pulled in) were just brushed off by 'experts' (Nicholas, Jed Distler, Bryce Morrison). The Gramophone's ringing endorsement of Hatto supplied the copy text for all the obituaries (Nicholas spewed it all out again in The Guardian, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, ). These guys should fall on their swords but are out in force defending their gullibility. IMO they should apologise and then vanish.

I'll add that the claim that these records are great has been often repeated to defend the offending critics, but in fact few have heard them (except for the famous concerto recordings by Ashkenazy, Bronfman et al) so it is not at all clear that these really are great recordings. In any case the critics defence has been that they were picked for their anonymity - hardly a sign of greatness. I also wonder how many of these recordings the admiring critics ever actually heard, and ever possessed in other than CD-R or white label form. They have repeated that there are 120 CDs in this 'great legacy' but have they actually worked through them all? I suggest not.

I'll stop now, except to say that my attempt to add a very mildly worded query about the role of critics in the Hatto fiasco to the Gramophone website was censored. That is why I am not impressed by their continued manipulation of the news.

What David said.

[Bright Moments]

maybe i missed something, but shouldn't hubby be going to jail??

[mjzee]

There's a cloak-and-dagger aspect to the Hatto revelation that I find intriguing. The Wall St Journal in February published an article, and here are two excerpts:

"But earlier this month, Brian Ventura, a classical-music fan and financial analyst in Mount Vernon, N.Y., said he put Ms. Hatto's "Liszt's 12 Transcendental Studies" into his computer to transfer it to his iPod -- and was surprised when Apple Inc.'s iTunes software identified it as a CD by another pianist, Laszlo Simon. "At first I thought it was a misunderstanding," Mr. Ventura said.

"The next morning, Mr. Ventura said, he went to Amazon.com and found samples of the Simon recordings, which sounded very similar. That left Mr. Ventura wondering: Had Amazon somehow posted the wrong clips?

""I really didn't know what to do about it," he said. "I wanted very much to believe that the Joyce Hatto story was true because it's such an amazing story."

"He emailed critic Jed Distler, which led to an investigation by Gramophone, a United Kingdom classical-music magazine. Gramophone sent the recordings to a sound engineer, Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio, who said 10 of the Hatto tracks were indeed from a 1987 recording by Mr. Simon on BIS Records. (Mr. Rose's Web site includes an online demonstration that lets you listen to the Hatto track in one ear and the Simon track -- slightly time-shrunk -- in the other.)

"Gramophone's story led classical-music experts and fans to put on headphones and join the hunt. That led to a deluge of charges that more Hatto recordings were swiped from other sources, sometimes with audio trickery involved, such as shrinking or stretching the length of the recording."

"As the affair has unfolded, classical-music fans have been slugging it out on online forums and Internet newsgroups. Technically minded fans, meanwhile, have wondered about iTunes' role as a techno sleuth.

"Like many digital-music programs, iTunes recognizes a CD put in a computer by querying a database maintained by a company called Gracenote, of Emeryville, Calif. Gracenote recognizes a CD by the number of tracks it has and the length of each of those tracks; when combined, the two form a mathematical fingerprint that Gracenote says is essentially unique for CDs with more than about five songs.

"In comparing the Hatto and Simon CDs, Mr. Rose noted that track times had been shrunk or stretched, and the fifth Hatto track is 13 seconds shorter than the fifth Simon track -- because it is actually a recording by Minoru Nojima. Would such discrepancies throw off Gracenote? The company said a single outlier would tax the system's matching ability but shouldn't throw it off, though it is impossible to say without examining the actual CDs. And even then, variables in CD pressings might leave the question unsettled."

What struck me when I read the article is that the reporter didn't try to recreate what Mr. Ventura said he experienced. It would have been an easy experiment: just put the Hatto CD into a computer and see what iTunes returns as the disc. It would be interesting if iTunes did not return the Simon data, but instead identified the CD as Hatto. I guess what I'm trying to say is: did someone in the know tattle on Hatto/Barrington-Coupe and use iTunes as a camouflage?

[ghost of miles]

Aloc started a separate thread for Mark Singer's New Yorker article, which I just read in the print edition; thought I'd link to it here as well.

[Swinging Swede]

"In 1992, in Gramophone, the critic Bryce Morrison found that Yefim Bronfman’s Rachmaninoff Third Concerto lacked “the sort of angst or urgency that has endeared Rachmaninov to millions” and that “Bronfman sounds oddly unmoved by Rachmaninov ’s intensely slavonic idiom. In the sunset coda of the Adagio his playing is devoid of glamour and in the finale’s fugue he lacks crispness and definition.” Fifteen years later, he wrote of Hatto’s release of the same recording: “stunning . . . truly great . . . among the finest on record . . . with a special sense of its Slavic melancholy.”"

[Jim Alfredson]

I just read the New Yorker article, in print form. Fascinating fraud!

[alocispepraluger102]

the only way this was discovered was through our data gathering devices.

way back when, aloc could have issued some forgissimo cd's and no one would have noticed.

[Larry Kart]

Hard for me now to recall everything that was said about the Hatto hoax on rec.music.classical.recordings before and after the hoax was uncovered, but, again IIRC, Singer's New Yorker piece struck me as much too credulous. The only thing we know for sure about Hatto is that she played the piano at one time; as far as I know, virtually everything else that has not been firmly established to have been faked/fraudulent has NOT been nailed down, including two things in particular -- did Hatto have cancer and when did she die? I know that her husband says June 2006 for her death date (mighty convenient in the light of all that has happened), but I wouldn't be surprised if that was faked too and that Hatto died years ago. Yes, people supposedly talked to her on the phone in recent years, but I can easily see hubby W B-C doing "Hatto" a la Peter Sellers or Dame Edna. As for her oncologist, who is cited here and there along lines that don't quite support W B-C in one or more senses but do support him in others (e.g. Hatto did have cancer? was she alive until 2006?) -- again, has anyone seen this dude face-to-face and verified who he is? I know in my bones how guys like W B-C operate, and one of their key, near-infallible moves is to thrust alleged sad weakness before us (unfairly neglected woman dying of cancer) and then, when the jig threatens to be up, "admit" to certain things that in effect bolster some remaining aspects of what almost always is a wholesale ongoing fraud -- wholesale beyond the wildest imaginings of a sober, human interest-y New Yorker writer. What keeps the W B-Cs of the world going is their ability to maintain some shred of the basically fraudulent under all conditions and at all times; the core of their identity is their ability/need to get you to believe in real time, while they bear witness to your belief, something that they've made up almost completely, working in just enough bits of fact. I would hazard the guess that their biggest thrills come when the jig is up (or it seems so to us), when they can semi-confess to the likes of a Mark Singer while still keeping their working hand moving about covertly in their pants.

[Larry Kart]

Also, if Hatto did have cancer and it was diagnosed in 1966 (IIRC that was the story), she then lived another 40 years? And I don't recall that remission was part of the tale. Probably not utterly unprecedented, if true, but way out on the edge somewhere.

[Joe]

Clem -- I've searched the tubes for info on the Alan Watkins scenario, but I can't seem to locate anything. Would you mind giving us a quick refresher?

[kenny weir]

I thought it was a good read, as far as it went. Not for a minute did I think it told the whole story or anything like it.

[Larry Kart]

Kart, when are you getting back in the game? We can run this music writing racket all over again w/o even half-trying... which is twice as much as what these other dupes are capable of. Singer is a skilled craftsman/hack but hey, how hard was it, really, to let W B-C go & then quote to fit? Not very.

Kind Regards,

Elder Don Clementine

Too old, too tired (at least I have been for a while), and too many "life issues" to deal with. Posting here and accepting an occasional liner note job for a record that I like seems to be what fits. But it could be fun. In particular, I sometimes think what it would be like to have Ratliff or Chinen's gig, to be able to hear all that you physically could hear, react to/think about it right quick, and then put your thoughts in print immediately. From prior experience, there's a mutually stimulating rhythm that can develop between yourself and the scene under such circumstances. I believe Mark Stryker has been/is operating along those lines.

[Larry Kart]

The mysterious "Alan Watkins" was a regular RMCR poster, supposedly a native of Great Britain who had spent most of his adult life working as a tympanist with orchestras in Eastern Europe, mainly Czechoslovakia. Watkins, coming on like a a parody of an amiable old buffer, would typically reminisce about marvelous performances of marvelous Dvorak and Smetana works that he had been part of, usually conducted by semi-obscure but terribly underrated (by his account) Czech conductors. No particular red flags here, but there was in retrospect a consistent air of passive-aggressive self-importance in Watkins's posts, in that his persona was on the one hand humble and shambling and on the other hand quite insistent that he was a man who was brimful of special knowledge -- an actual professional musician (albeit, and this was perhaps crucial, on an instrument of relative obscurity i.e. opine about the violin or the piano or even the French horn, and others who know those instruments will show up on such forums; opine about the tympani and orchestral percusssion in general and you'll probably hold the floor), and a specialist in the Czech repertoire and how it should be played (music of undoubted importance but not music that a whole lot of people know inside out, as Watkins claimed to do).

In any case, having established himself as part of the RMCR landscape, Watkins weighed in with much fervor early on and throughout the Hatto affair as someone who had acquired and loved all her recordings, had met and talked to Hatto, who endorsed every aspect of W B-C's tale and who, from within his amiable old buffer pose professed to be shocked and dismayed that our world had come to such a pass that anyone would suggest that there was a fraud going on here, especially when it involved thinking and saying bad things about a sick and now dead lady. Again, I can't recall all the details, but as the hoax became impossible for anyone but a lunatic or someone who was in on it himself to deny, Watkins began a crablike (if crabs can shamble) retreat, though he gave up ground in the W B-C manner, as though one should give him sympathy and moral credit for doing so rather than remain suspicious of how much was still being concealed. Eventually, IIRC, it turned out that there was no record of anyone by the name of Alan Watkins ever having played tympani in the Czech orchestras he claimed to have been part of (other parts of Watkins's stated bio previously had been tested and found improbable or impossible), and that Watkins (whoever he really was) and W B-C had been connected in some manner for decades (if indeed there really was an "Alan Watkins" at all). I'm sure that there are many further details to this aspect of this twisted tale, but at some point Alan Watkins ceased to post on RMCR. Hurt feelings, I suppose. BTW, speaking of the amiable buffer persona, it just occurrred to me: Alan Watkins = Dr. Watson?

[Joe]

Thanks Larry.

Fascinating to me how much effort seems to have been expended to keep this hoax going.

[Chuck Nessa]

Forever her name will now be Joyce Hatto-Hoax.

Certainly not what the hubby had in mind.

[B. Clugston]

I really like Hatto’s organ trio albums. She did some mean versions of “Wealthy Street,” “Greaze Monkey” and “Brother Ray.”

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I really like Hatto’s organ trio albums. She did some mean versions of “Wealthy Street,” “Greaze Monkey” and “Brother Ray.”

Damn! And I thought it was Joey, moonlighting!

MG

[Larry Kart]

Forever her name will now be Joyce Hatto-Hoax.

Certainly not what the hubby had in mind.

I believe that in one sense that's exactly what W B-C had in mind, because "Joyce Hatto-Hoax" places him and his perversities forever front-and-center. It's as though, you should pardon the expression, he now has a stiff p---- for all eternity.

[JSngry]

plate?

[T.D.]

Also, if Hatto did have cancer and it was diagnosed in 1966 (IIRC that was the story), she then lived another 40 years? And I don't recall that remission was part of the tale. Probably not utterly unprecedented, if true, but way out on the edge somewhere.

Exactly, way out. Especially considering that it was said to be ovarian cancer.

[Larry Kart]

plate?

No -- plick.

[Jim Alfredson]

I really like Hatto's organ trio albums. She did some mean versions of "Wealthy Street," "Greaze Monkey" and "Brother Ray."

Damn! And I thought it was Joey, moonlighting!

MG