The revelations concerning some of
the recordings made by Joyce Hatto came
as a total shock to those of us at MusicWeb.
We had been reviewing Concert Artist
discs for about three years and had
been making them available for sale
for just over a year. I only spoke to
William once by phone although we were
in e-mail contact virtually every day.
Ates Orga also had contact with him
and had written an extended article
about Joyce Hatto for MusicWeb. I extended
our sympathy to William when Joyce died.
I did not ask to attend the funeral
as I felt I did not know him well enough.
This year I held a MusicWeb lunch for
reviewers on January 27th to which William
was invited as a guest so that reviewers
could meet him. Such occasions are very
busy but I did give him a lift from
the station and back and he sat opposite
me at the lunch so I did have extended
chats with him. It was obvious that
he was still grieving for Joyce and
she filled his conversation. He talked
about many personal matters but he really
was the last person one could imagine
as a con-artist.
William Barrington-Coupe (right) with
a MusicWeb reviewer © MusicWeb International
There had been various conspiracy theories
running in the newsgroups but a number
of totally inaccurate things had also
been said there about MusicWeb so I
did not give them any credence. I knew
that Joyce Hatto had existed and I knew
people who had spoken or corresponded
with her very recently. You can find
early references to her by leafing through
copies of Gramophone from the 1960s
and 1970s. When Andrew Rose produced
his analysis it seemed unbelievable,
but only for a few moments because the
evidence was so overwhelming. It seems
clear to me now that the production
of Concert Artist discs bearing Hatto’s
name was not an excusable, rash, action
arising from a time of grief but seems
to have been perpetrated over a much
long period of time. We will probably
never know whether anyone else apart
from William was involved in these seemingly
deliberate acts.
William protested his innocence in
an e-mail and said he had no explanation
for Andrew Rose's discovery but that
he was trying to get hold of the Liszt
12 transcendental studies recorded by
Lazlo Simon on BIS so he could listen
for himself. Things have moved on too
much since then. The discs were not
what Concert Artist claimed them to
be and it subsequently emerged that
William had already served time for
fraud. We had no option but to stop
offering Concert Artist discs for sale
from MusicWeb until it could be clear
which were genuine. The discs have,
as one might expect, now become more
eagerly sought after but MusicWeb never
held any actual stocks of discs and
I probably would not have sold those
if we had. I approached our reviewers
and Ates Orga to see if they now wished
to withdraw or amend their reviews but
nobody wanted to do so.
One might ask if we had ever suspected
there might have been a problem with
the Hatto recordings. We handle about
300 discs per month and it just never
occurred that a disc might be anything
other than it claimed to be. It might
appear like hindsight now but just after
the MusicWeb lunch Chris Thomas, David
Dyer and myself were listening to the
Ravel recordings and did express amazement
that a woman in such a terminal stage
of cancer could produce playing of such
power; but we never went so far as to
think the discs might be forgeries.
It has been a sad few days but our
reviews still stand because they were
not about Joyce Hatto but about the
performance on each disc. The comments
made still stand, it merely remains
to identify who the various artists
were.
Len Mullenger
.
