newspapers such as The Boston Globe, eventually discovered Hatto, reviewed the
recordings (with mostly very favourable notices), and published interviews and
appreciations of her career. In one case she was described as ‘the greatest living pianist
that almost no one has ever heard of.’
In May 2005 the musicologist Marc-André Roberge reported on the Yahoo! Godowsky
group! that in Hatto’s version of the Chopin-Godowsky Studies on the Concert Artist
Label a misreading of a chord was identical to one on the Carlos Grante recording
released in 1993. This curious co-incidence, however, did not prompt Roberge, or others,
to investigate further, and verification of the copying from the Grante disc only occurred
in 2007.
In early 2006, doubts about various aspects of Hatto’s recording output were being
expressed both on the internet and, following the publication of a lengthy appreciation of
Hatto in the March issue of Gramophone, by readers of that magazine. In particular,
some found it hard to believe that a pianist who had not performed in public for decades
and was said to be fighting cancer should produce in her old age a vast number of
recordings, all apparently of high quality. It also proved difficult to confirm any of the
details of the recordings made with orchestra, including even the existence of the
conductor credited.
The doubters were vigorously countered, most publicly by critic Jeremy Nicolas who, in
the July 2006 issue of Gramophone, challenged unnamed sceptics to substantiate their
accusations by providing evidence that ‘would stand up in a court of law’. Nicolas’s
challenge was not taken up, and in December, Radio New Zealand was able, in all
innocence, to rebroadcast their hour-long programme of glowing appreciation of the
Concert Artists Hatto CDs. This programme included excerpts from a telephone
interview with Hatto herself, conducted on 6 April 2006, which did nothing to dispel the
presenter’s assumption that she was the sole pianist on all the CDs. The favourable
reviews and publicity generated substantial sales for the Concert Artists CDs.
Joyce Hatto died on 29 or 30 June 2006. In February 2007 it was announced that the
CDs ascribed to Hatto had been discovered to contain copies, in some case 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, NewYork, put the recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes credited to Hatto
on his computer, the Gracenote database used by the iTunes software identified the disc
not as a recording by Hatto but by one László Simon. On checking on-line 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.
Distler said: ‘When I received 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,