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"A
piece of software used by Apple's iTunes has accidentally sparked a scandal
in the classical music world -- and cast a shadow on the reputation of an
obscure, deceased British pianist now accused of plagiarism.
The alleged hoax, in which the recorded works of pianist Joyce Hatto
have been called into question, was uncovered using database software that
automatically identifies CDs so that fans don't have to manually enter artist
and track information when they load the music onto their computers. Technology
helped enable the alleged trickery; a newer technology uncovered it.
When a reader of the British classical music magazine Gramophone loaded
a Hatto disc onto his computer, the database correctly identified it as
a performance of a Franz Liszt piano composition -- but marked it as a CD
recorded by another pianist, Laszlo Simon. The technology behind the CD
database, operated by Gracenote, a California company, indexes data on about
4 million CDs. The lengths of tracks on Hatto's and Simon's albums were
identical, causing the database to make what appeared to be a mistake.
Or was it a mistake? The reader contacted a Gramophone critic, who played
the Simon recording on iTunes, compared it to the Hatto recording and found
that the two CDs sounded the same. The magazine passed the matter to independent
sound engineers, who have concluded that the two versions were, in fact,
the same performance. Since then, engineers have found at least a dozen
examples of other performances that appear to have been pilfered and issued
under Hatto's name.
Gramophone revealed its findings on its Web site last Thursday in what
it said was an abbreviated form of a story to be published in the magazine's
April issue.
Hatto's recordings were published by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe,
on a small British label called Concert Artist. The label has released more
than 100 albums under Hatto's name. Barrington-Coupe yesterday denied any
wrongdoing.
"Sound waves don't prove anything," he said. "If the sound
waves are giving that impression, I'm at a loss."
Barrington-Coupe said that the findings published on the Web , have started
a "culture of fear" among critics in London who are afraid to
stand up and defend the Hatto recordings now in dispute. "They're being
told that something is a scientific fact, and they're no longer believing
their ears," he said.
'I did it for my wife' – Joyce Hatto exclusive, William
Barrington-Coupe confesses February 26 2007
In an amazing turn of events, Gramophone has learned of a letter sent from
William Barrington-Coupe to the head of BIS records in which he makes a
full confession of his wrongdoing in the Joyce Hatto affair. Gramophone
subsequently contacted Barrington-Coupe, who confirmed that he stands by
the letter’s contents.
It was Gramophone that first revealed how several of the recordings released
by Barrington-Coupe under his late wife’s name were identical to other
recordings by a range of pianists on different labels. A media storm ensued,
with most of the world’s major media outlets reporting the scandal.
Amidst it all, Barrington-Coupe denied all allegations of wrongdoing and
insisted that he was present at all major sessions, and that the discs were
all his wife’s work.
The truth, we now know from his own pen, is different. Robert von Bahr’s
BIS records had one of the first identified cases of duplication –
the “Hatto” recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies exactly
matched the soundwaves on Laszlo Simon’s BIS recording. And it was
to von Bahr whom Barrington-Coupe wrote his letter of confession.
Although he has made clear that he is not “seeking revenge”,
von Bahr kindly agreed to make the substance of the letter known to us,
especially as the writer does not bind him to confidentiality. In the letter,
Barrington-Coupe explains that he did indeed pass off other people’s
recordings as his wife’s, but that he did it to give her the illusion
of a great end to an unfairly (as he terms it) overlooked career.
This is the story, as Barrington-Coupe tells it.
The advent of compact disc in 1983 meant that the cassettes he was producing
of his wife playing were quickly ignored by critics, as magazines such as
Gramophone gradually made the transition to the new format. It was not until
many years later, Barrington-Coupe writes, that he had the capacity to produce
CDs, by which time Hatto was already in the advanced stages of the ovarian
cancer which would kill her. He tried to transfer the cassette recordings
to disc, but without great success. So the decision was made to re-record
her repertoire.
Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says
that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself. Recording
session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as
she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem
passages.
Until, that is, he remembered the story of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf covering
the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the famous EMI recording of Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde. Surely something similar could apply here, he reasoned.
He began searching for pianists whose sound and style were similar to that
of his wife, and once he had found them he would insert small patches of
their recordings to cover his wife’s grunts.
As he grew more adept at the practice, he began to take longer sections
to ease the editing process, and discovered, he says, by accident how to
digitally stretch the time of the source recordings to disguise the sound.
He would, he says, use Hatto’s performances as a blueprint and source
recordings which were along the same lines (Laszlo, for instance, shared
a teacher with his wife and so, Barington-Coupe says, had the same kind
of style and technique).
The performances were hailed as superb in Gramophone and elsewhere, and
finally his wife – fading fast – had the appreciation that her
husband felt was rightfully hers. According to his letter, though, she did
not hunger for fame and when told of the admiring article Jeremy Nicholas
wrote for Gramophone early in 2006 (which had a great effect in concentrating
critical eyes and ears upon her), she said: “It’s all too late.”
Barrington-Coupe, however, says he did not know about the process whereby
a computer’s media player seeks to identify a recording, until it was
too late. That led to his downfall. Now, he tells von Bahr, he deeply regrets
what has happened. He feels that he has acted stupidly, dishonestly and
unlawfully. However, he maintains that his wife knew nothing of the deception.
He also claims that he has not made vast amounts of money from what he has
done – and that the number of recordings sold by his company (including
non-Hatto discs) between April 2006 and the time of writing only number
5595. The number of recordings sold in the previous year was only 3051 (he
confirmed these figures to Gramophone).
The question remains as to how much of this confession we should actually
believe. It is in some ways a humane, romantic story. However, newspaper
investigations following the first Hatto revelations have uncovered shady
dealing from Barrington-Coupe’s past. He received a prison sentence
in 1966 for failure to pay purchase tax. Whether this throws doubt on his
confession now, made only after our revelations and in the light of the
fact that he continued to release “Hatto” recordings after his
wife’s death, is open to debate.
What music lovers will want, and what he must surely now provide (together,
where possible, with witnesses who can verify), is a full and accurate list
of which Joyce Hatto recordings actually feature Joyce Hatto, and which
other artists were involved where appropriate. Only then will we know how
good she actually was, and only then can at least some of her reputation
be salvaged. When asked to do this, Barrington-Coupe replied that he didn’t
want to go down that road, adding, “I’m tired, I’m not very
well. I’ve closed the operation down, I’ve had the stock completely
destroyed, and I’m not producing any more. Now I just want a little
bit of peace.”
As for that, much depends on how the industry reacts. Von Bahr tells
Gramophone that he is unlikely to take action himself, as proving financial
loss for his Simon recordings would be tricky. He has no idea, he adds,
whether Barrington-Coupe is wealthy or not, and in any case, extracting
damages from him might be very difficult. “I’m not moved to seek
revenge,” he says, “but I’m very glad that the truth is at
last known.” (James Inverne, Gramaphone, February 26, 2007)
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Hatto died last year at the age of 77 after a long battle with cancer.
Although she was largely unknown for most of her career, she won a few champions
among critics toward the end of her life. A reviewer for the Boston Globe,
for example, called her "the greatest living pianist that almost no
one has ever heard of."
Her illness forced her to give up performing in public decades before
she died.
One sound engineer consulted for the British magazine's piece found a
Hatto recording that he believes is a performance originally attributed
to Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima.
"No pianist who's ever lived could replicate a performance to anything
like the degree of accuracy heard here; it's simply not humanly possible,"
Andrew Rose, the engineer, wrote in a recent posting on his Web site, where
he has put up clips of the music and side-by-side images of the recordings'
sound waves (http://www.pristineclassical.com).
Rose, who works for the audio restoration firm Pristine Audio, wrote
that the recordings are alike down to a measurement of "1/44,100th
of a second."
He concluded that some of the Hatto recordings he looked at had been
tampered with in an apparent move to evade detection. He found, for example,
that one track had been slowed down by more than 15 percent; when the effect
was reversed, Rose concluded that the track had originally been published
on a recording attributed to pianist Carlo Grante. "We have yet to
investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax," he
wrote.
Tom Huizenga, a music producer at National Public Radio who also reviews
classical music performances for The Washington Post, said "it would
be hard to dispute" the findings of the sound engineers in this case.
Different performers play pieces with their own unique rhythms, he said,
and different pianos recorded in different environments would also produce
different sound waves -- rather than the identical ones found by the engineers
in this case.
"Looks like this guy" -- Hatto's husband -- "is busted
big time," he said.
The editor of Gramophone, James Inverne, said yesterday that he did not
have a theory as to how other artists' performances ended up under Hatto's
name but that there was no doubt in his mind that the recordings were pilfered.
He called the story "sad" and "ironic."
"You may use technology to try and hoodwink people," he said,
"but you never know when it's going to come back and bite you.""
(Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post, February 22, 2007)
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