Fraud Revealed
In February 2007 it was announced in a series of articles in Gramophone and the magazine's website (after editor James Inverne commissioned an intensive investigation from audio expert Andrew Rose and others) that the CDs ascribed to Hatto had been discovered to contain copies, in some cases digitally manipulated (stretched or shrunk in time, re-equalised and rebalanced), of published commercial recordings made by other artists. While some of these artists were well-known, the majority were less so. When Brian Ventura, a financial analyst from Mount Vernon, New York, put the recording of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes credited to Hatto into his computer, the Gracenote database used by the iTunes software identified the disc not as a recording by Hatto but as one by László Simon. On checking online samples of the Simon recording, Ventura found it to be remarkably similar to the version credited to Hatto. He then contacted Jed Distler, a critic for Classics Today and Gramophone, who had praised many of the recordings ascribed to Hatto.
Says Distler,
| “ | When I received Brian Ventura's e-mail I decided to investigate further. After careful comparison of the actual Simon performances to the Hatto, 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. I reported my findings to Mr. Ventura, and cc'd Classicstoday.com editor David Hurwitz. I also cc'd Gramophone's editor James Inverne, plus three of my Gramophone colleagues who had written about Hatto. Then I wrote Mr. Barrington-Coupe. He quickly replied, claiming not to know what had happened, and to be as puzzled as I was. At James Inverne's suggestion, Andrew Rose contacted me, and I uploaded three MP3s from the Hatto Liszt disc. Andrew's research confirmed what my ears suspected: at least two Liszt tracks were identical between BIS and Concert Artist, while at least one was not. | ” |
An identification of the source of another recording, which had been in preparation for some months, was released the following day by The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) (based at Royal Holloway, University of London) as a by-product of research on performances of Chopin Mazurkas. Within a week of the initial story being posted on the Gramophone website on 15 February, the sources for some 20 of Hatto's Concert Artist CDs had been identified.
On each of the concerto recordings published in Hatto's final years under her name, the conductor's name was given as "René Köhler", and Barrington-Coupe provided a detailed biography for "Köhler". The information given there has not withstood careful scrutiny. The conductors whose work is represented on the concerto recordings credited to Hatto and Köhler are now known to include Esa-Pekka Salonen, André Previn and Bernard Haitink, while the orchestras, claimed to be the National Philharmonic-Symphony and the Warsaw Philharmonia, are now known to include the Vienna Philharmonic, The Philharmonia, and the Royal Philharmonic.
Read more about this topic: Joyce Hatto
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