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Waveform sleuth uncovers music fraud
February 28, 2007

Illness forced an end to British classical pianist Joyce Hatto’s performing career in the mid-1970s, but recordings issued under her name before her death last year garnered critical acclaim. Here is critic Richard Dyer writing in 2005: “Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.”

In fact, she was a witting or unwitting participant in an elaborate fraud apparently perpetrated by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, who is also proprietor of the Concert Artist label under which she ostensibly recorded. That fraud began to unravel earlier this month when a reader of ClassicsToday ripped a CD.

Here’s ClassicsToday executive editor David Hurwitz: “It seems that the reader had purchased a copy of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes with Joyce Hatto on the Concert Artist label…. When he attempted to transfer this recording via his computer using iTunes, the track listing revealed the artist as Laszlo Simon, who recorded the same music for BIS.”

That prompted ClassicsToday writer Jed Distler to listen closely to the Simon recording and the purported Hatto version: “…it appeared to me that 10 out of 12 tracks showed remarkable similarity in terms of tempi, accents, dynamics, balances, etc. By contrast, Track Five, Feux Follets, sounded different between the two sources.”

Subsequently, Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio applied technology to verify what Distler was hearing. On his Website, he provides details of his comparison of the alleged Hatto version of Liszt’s Mazeppa (track 4) with the Simon version. His conclusion: The Hatto recording is identical to the Simon recording except that it has been time-shrunk by 0.02%, and the equalization has been altered. You can view the Adobe Audition waveforms of the Hatto and Simon recordings plus the waveforms of two independent recordings of the same work here, where you can also see the Har-Bal software-generated equalization-profile difference and listen to MP3 clips.

As for track 5, Feux Follets, which Distler said sounded different—is that Hatto’s? Rose reports that “…we had to scour the Internet for the obscure source material. After a couple of dozen clearly different recordings, I eventually found a disc by Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima, released in 1993, which matched the fifth track on the alleged Hatto Liszt recording…. There can therefore be no shred of doubt about the fact that the 'Hatto' recording of track five on the CD is a clumsily doctored version of the Nojima recording.”

He provides several other examples and reports that “We have yet to investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax.”

Hurwitz at ClassicsToday questions the motives behind the production of the bogus disks: “…it’s not difficult in today’s digital marketplace to engineer a fake, but there’s so little money in doing so that one can only wonder why anyone would want to bother.”

Yesterday’s Boston Globe has the answer: “After days of denials, Hatto's husband…admitted…that he took recordings by others and issued them under Hatto's name on his own label, sometimes speeding them up or slowing them down. He said that he did it for his wife, whose career had been largely overlooked.”

According to Globe and ClassicsToday reports, Barrington-Coupe has said he began splicing small parts of others’ work into Hatto's recordings to repair sections of performances marred by the ailing Hatto’s cries of pain; as her illness worsened he found himself appropriating longer and longer pieces. He has further said his wife know nothing about the practice, although Rose, quoted in the Globe, disputes that.

If there is a winner in this sad story it may be Laszlo Simon, one of the original victims. According to yesterday’s Globe, Robert von Bahr, CEO of BIS, “said he spoke to Simon...and urged him to take advantage of the publicity. ‘He has gotten more PR than he would get in five lifetimes. This is the time for him to go out and get those concerts.'"

Posted by Rick Nelson on February 28, 2007 | Comments (0)