HATTO'S OFF

posted by James Reel

    During the past year, critics have been all a-twitter over a slew of recordings featuring a reclusive and now dead British pianist named Joyce Hatto. According to legend, health problems caused her to stop concertizing in the 1970s, but she spend the remaining three decades of her life in the studio, recording her entire repertory. The CDs, most of them thrust into the market with great fanfare over the past several months, have been greeted as among the finest performances of this music in recorded history (especially astonishing as they were made by a sickly 70-year-old woman).
    Well, they may be among the finest in recorded history, but it seems they aren't by Joyce Hatto. Looks like her husband, who owns the little recording company that's been issuing the discs, has been pirating recordings by other pianists, some obscure, some not, including Yefim Bronfman and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Here's the New York Times article inspired by the original Gramophone news item, and here's a site, with waveforms and audio clips, that links Hatto's recordings to specific releases by other pianists.
    If Gramophone hadn't launched the investigation, I would take this opportunity to sneer at British boosterism gone bad, because it was mainly the British press that launched the Hatto adulation, with Americans then going along with it. But really, given that almost nobody has turned up who actually heard Hatto play in concert, and that an elderly, cancer-stricken woman was purported to be making top-quality recordings of very difficult piano music, how could everybody have been so credulous?