By now the scandal surrounding the late English pianist Joyce Hatto is all over the net, but the fascinating thing to me is not the role that technology played in exposing the Hatto hoax but rather the obscurantist fetish of so many music critics.
Hatto died in June 2006, and had been heralded by many critics, including those at Gramophone. Part of the appeal of Hatto for critics was that her recordings were so hard to obtain; released on a very small label, finding Hatto’s CDs was apparently fairly difficult. If you enjoyed Hatto, you were by definition in a small elite who had actually been able to find one of her CDs. As Gramophone noted in its mea culpa article,
To love Hatto recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didn’t need the hype of a major label’s marketing spend to recognise a good, a great, thing when they heard it.
Of course it turns out that the reason Hatto was so accomplished on such a diverse body of work was that very few, if any, of the recordings sold under her name were actually her music. Rather, they were other people’s performances with occasional small tricks like slight compression of the music to try to fool those who might compare the Hatto recording with the original.
The hoax was finally undone when a Gramophone critic went to play CD of Hatto playing Liszt and noticed that his computer’s music player identified it as another pianists recording of Liszt. The critic then compared the two and noticed that Hatto’s recording was identical to the other artists, and soon it became apparent that pretty much everything recorded under Hatto’s name was, in fact, someone else’s music.
Yeah, thank goodness those critics don’t fall for the lame hype of record companies.