Quirk
Distinguished Member
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 2,477
- Reaction score
- 10
Pianist in 'plagiarism' row 20/02/2007 17:02 - (SA) London - A British pianist who was belatedly hailed as a virtuoso in the final years of her life may have passed off recordings by better known musicians as her own, Gramophone magazine reported on Monday. When Joyce Hatto died last June aged 77 after a 30-year battle with cancer which had prevented her from appearing in public since the early 1970s, she was described as one of the greatest British musicians ever. Although she made her London debut in 1952 and built a solid reputation around performances of Chopin and Liszt, it was only in her final years that she was rediscovered by critics and hailed as a genius. Her works, including the complete solo works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, were released by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, on the tiny Concert Artist label. But now Gramophone claims to have detected striking similarities between her renditions of famous classical works and those of others which raise questions about plagiarism. These emerged when a critic put a compact disc of Hatto's rendition of Liszt's 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer and his iTunes audio player identified it as a version by Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon. The same happened for a Hatto recording of two Rachmaninov piano concertos, which the computer identified as a performance by the Russian-Israeli Yefim Bronfman. Tested by an audio expert The magazine then sent the recordings to an audio expert, who performed tests on the soundwaves and found they were the same. The expert also reportedly found that a Hatto disc of music by Leopold Godowsky had been been manipulated to alter its sound. When this "stretch" effect was reversed, the track was identical to a version played by Italian pianist Carlo Grante. Barrington-Coupe could not explain the similarity when contacted by Gramophone.
