On
February 15th, 2007 the news broke that some of the recordings by the
late British pianist Joyce
Hatto (1928-2006) released on the Concert Artist label were in
fact
illegal copies of recordings by other pianists. In some cases
the
recordings were sped up or slowed down by as much as 20% so as to
disguise their true origins. The first disc to be so
identified contained Liszt's 12 Transcendental Etudes.
Eleven of the Etudes on that CD had been taken
from a CD on the BIS label
by the pianist László Simon while the remaining Etude
("feux-follets") was traced to a CD by the Japanese pianist,
Minoru Nojima. Within a week several more Joyce Hatto CDs
were
found to be forgeries. It is now widely believed that all of
Joyce Hatto's CDs are fakes
except for the disc containing Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations, which
she really did record in
1970 with the conductor Vernon Handley.
Joyce Hatto's
CD received rave reviews from Gramophone Magazine,
Musicweb-International.com, ClassicsToday.com, the Boston Globe, and
other publications and websites. William Barrington-Coupe,
the
owner of Concert Artist and husband of the late Joyce Hatto, still
refuses to
divulge the full list of recordings he used to create the Hatto
catalogue so that the actual performers can receive the
acknowledgement and credit they are due. The task
of discovering and crediting the proper performers has instead been
left to piano enthuasiasts. Thanks to detective work by a number of
people throughout the world many of the Joyce Hatto CDs have been
properly
identified, but the sources for a significant number of CDs
and tracks remains
unknown.
On
these pages you will find the current
identification status of all published Joyce Hatto CDs on the
Concert Artist label. In some
cases more than one version of the same CD was published by Concert
Artist. This has been accounted for when known. All
identifications have been confirmed first by ear and then
visually by
wav file image comparisons. When tempo manipulation
has
taken place this too is noted. The Hatto and source
wav
files will not always look exactly alike as the sound and tempo
alterations
that some sources have been subjected to in order to create the Joyce
Hatto version can change the wav file appearance. However,
the matching of the wav files patterns is still clear.
The
format for each identification page is as follows: At the top of the
page you will find the cover scans of the Joyce Hatto
CD and
all known
sources for that CD. A short capsule summary
mentioning in
brief how the CD was compiled follows. Below that is a track by track
listing
of the Hatto CD. When a performance has been identified, wav
file
images of the source recording and the Hatto recording are
juxtaposed along with their timings rounded to the nearest second.
Timings have been determined after trimming any blank
space at the beginning and end of tracks. For tracks in which
it is not possible to determine the exact ending point, such as those
with long fade outs, the striking of the final note or chord is used as
the
ending point for timings.
The
task of identifying these recordings is a mammoth one that can not be
accomplished without the assistance of others.
Please contact me if you believe you have identified the
source
of a Joyce Hatto recording. I will be happy
to
follow up and
post wav file
verifications here of identified recordings.