Joyce Hatto - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Her playing drew mixed notices from the critics. A critic for The Times wrote of an October 1953 performance at Chelsea Town Hall that "Joyce Hatto grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozart's D minor piano concerto and was impeded from conveying significant feelings towards the work, especially in quick figuration." Trevor Harvey wrote of her Saga recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 "one wonders ... whether her technique is really on top of the difficulties of this music ... She shows a musical sense of give and take with the orchestra but it remains a small, rather pallid performance" (The Gramophone, August 1961).

Vernon Handley, who conducted the Guildford Philharmonic on Hatto's 1970 recording of Sir Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations for her husband's Revolution label, said that "s a solo pianist, she was absolutely marvellous. She had ten wonderful fingers and she could get round anything and also she was an extraordinarily charming person to work with, even if she could be very difficult." In another interview, after the hoax had been revealed, he added that "he had a very doubtful sense of rhythm ... he recording of the Bax was a tremendous labour." Still the record received a favourable review: "Joyce Hatto gives a highly commendable account of the demanding piano part," wrote Robert Layton (Gramophone, February 1971).

In 1973 Hatto gave the world premiere of two recently-published Bourrées by Frédéric Chopin in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. However in 1976 she stopped performing in public. It was later claimed that she was already battling cancer at the time. However, the consultant radiologist who saw her every six weeks for the last eight years of her life stated that she was first treated for ovarian cancer in 1992, fourteen years before her death and had had no previous history of the disease.