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 Gramohone’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 [of the audio-restoration business Pristine
Audio] 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), 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 of some twenty 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 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-Peska Salonen, André Previn and
Bernard Haitink, while the orchestras, claimed to be the National Philharmonic-
Symphony and the Warsaw Philharmoni,a are now known to include the Vienna
Philharmonic, The Philharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic.
Barrington-Coupe initially denied any wrongdoing but subsequently admitted the fraud in
a letter to Robert von Bahr, the head of the Swedish BIS record label that had originally
issued some of the recordings plagiarised by Concert Artists. Bahr shared the contents of
his letter with Gramophone magazine which reported the confession on its website on 26
February 2007. Barrington-Coupe claims that Hatto was unaware of the deception, that
he acted out of love and made little money from the enterprise, and that he started out by
pasting portions of other pianists’ recordings into recordings made by Hatto in order to
cover up her ‘gasps of pain’. Some critics, however, have cast doubt on this version of
events. Discovery of plagiarised tracks on another pianist’s Concert Artist compact disc
release casts further doubts.
HAYDN
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) is one of the four great classical composers, the others being
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Haydn is regarded as the first important composer of
the classical period which followed the baroque and rococo periods. He is often
described as the father of the symphony and the string quartet, and is a significant
classical composer for the piano.