HAND
Care
A pianist’s hand and fingers should be looked after. They should be protected from
rough work, the fingernails should be carefully trimmed and a hand cream should be
regularly applied.
Position
The hand should be placed so that the fingers and thumb of each hand are in a straight
line. The rounded hand position facilitates the passing under of the thumb but may be
modified when large stretches or black notes are involved. The fingers should be convex
and should not buckle inwards. A pianist’s fingers are, in effect, small hammers and
should always strike downwards on the keys. They should never strike forward into the
keys.
HATTO
Joyce Hatto (1928-2006) was a British pianist and piano teacher. She became famous
later in life when unauthorised copies of commercial recordings made by other pianists
were released under her name, earning her praise from critics. The fraud only came to
light a few months after her death.
Hatto played at a small number of concerts in London beginning in the 1950s. There
were also concerts by ‘pupils of Joyce Hatto.’ She taught piano at a girls’ boarding
school, Crofton Grange, in Hertfordshire. Her playing drew mixed notices from the
critics. Hatto had stopped performing in public by 1976, with only a few recordings to
her credit, none for a major label. In Hatto’s last years more than a hundred recordings
falsely attributed to her appeared. The repertoire represented on the CDs included the
complete sonatas of Beethoven, Mozart and Prokofiev, concertos by Rachmaninoff,
Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mendelssohn and most of Chopin’s compositions along with
rarer works such as the complete Godowsky Chopin Etudes.
The recordings were released, along with piano recordings falsely attributed to the late
Sergio Fiorentino, by the English label Concert Artist Recordings run by Hatto’s husband,
William Barrington-Coupe. Barrington-Coupe had a long history in the record industry.
To go along with the release of these ‘Hatto’ recordings, stories began to be spread by
Barrington-Coupe about his wife’s contacts in the distant past with many of the greatest
musicians of the mid-twentieth century, all by then dead. Even the distinguished critic
Neville Cardus had been dazzled by her playing according to a story found in one
obituary.
From 2003 onwards, participants on the recordings attributed to Hatto began to receive
enthusiastic praise from a small number of internet users. Specialised record review
magazines and websites such as Gramophone, MusicWeb and Classics Today, as well as