Joyce Hatto hoax

[Jim Alfredson]

I hope nobody ever discovers that the organissimo records are really Jimmy Smith's last Blue Note releases played backwards and slowed down by .003%.

Oh wait...

Y'know Jim. I didn't want to say anything, but when I saw you guys play up in Baltimore I did raise an eyebrow when you were doing this Liberace move on the keyboard, in an attempt to disguise the fact that you were switching cds in the sound system behind you. I should have known -- Joe and Randy not only sounded like Grant Green and Ben Dixon, it WAS Green and Dixon!

I'm going to have to work on that move to make it more "seamless". Damn!

[Larry Kart]

And on Joyce Hatto, you guys are right to suggest that the idiotic reviewers will never recover from this. These guys just puff whatever they get for free, and don't ask too many questions. In this case, lots of people had questioned the authenticity of the recordings, but these dunces just piled up their freebies and banged out the publicity. Gramophone is claiming credit for uncovering the scandal, but it was also Gramophone who defended these recordings and told sceptics to put up or shut up and have some respect for the dead.

It's a bit more complicated than that. All the records Gramophone reviewers, and others of that ilk, get their hands on are freebies, so that in itself is not a motive to puff this recording over that one. Instead, the Hatto craze that preceded the Hatto hoax was a blend of a bizarre, sentimental human interest story (remember David Helfgott and "Shine"?) about a prolific, gravely-ill little-known and/or forgotten recluse; plus the deeply ingrained chauvanism/little island-boosterism of British classical music journalism; and of course, the clever-creepy fraudulence of whoever was engineering the hoax (Hatto's husband, one assumes). That is, knowing that he could play on the first two factors as givens, the perpetrator picked genuinely quite good recordings to fiddle around with and pirate. It's as though he went to school on the Helfgott affair and realized that the big flaw there was that Helfgott could no longer play very well, if indeed he ever could.

[Larry Kart]

I should have said "the Hatto craze that preceded the exposure of the Hatto hoax." The hoax in its hardcore sense was at work all along and in the softcore sense as well.

[Chas]

This has happened in other genres. Flyright Records in the U.K. issued an album by Otis "Elevator" Gilmore, supposedly a black Cincinnati bluesman, complete with photos and liner notes, that turned out to be a fraud. It was actually music by a white blues player named Danny Adler.

I have a memory that Steve Allen did something similar to this also.

Steve Allen was Buck Hammer.

And Steve Allen's maid was the Mary-Anne Jackson pictured on the cover of " The Wild Piano of Mary-Anne Jackson" . That record , along with the Buck Hammer , was issued on Steve Allen/Bob Thiele's Hanover label .

Allen was culture-jamming before it had a name .

[Larry Kart]

it's a little inside but ONE reason people are ecstatic/apoplectic over the hoax is some of Hatto's advoctes are insane delusional arrogant blowhards-- a former Philips appartchik named Tom Deacon for one. (He's "responsible," for example, for that "Great Pianists of the 20th Century" series.) Not only has he-- in what seems his not-retirement-enough-- been jizzing Hatto Hatto Hatto (see also those Distler links, he's just an anonymous sap by comparison; noone took him seriously before & even fewer will now) all while...

pissing on x # of the artists whose recordings turned out to be have swiped!!!!!

i.e. it'd be like my Branford scorn & then ya'll gave me a cd of Brand X that i said was hot as Rose Maddox' Chocha on a Bakersfield Summer afternoon.

ALSO the tepid (you know i'd say that) "oh but she's dead, have some respect" line of suppression holds no Ting w/me man-- dead is fucking DEAD, that's all. (gram-o-phone is just covering it's ass, it's not had a semblance of critical respect in 10+ years alas but it still has some commercial life in it, albeit marginal & somewhere in between magazines dedicated to civil war reenactment & build-yr-own-tube-amplifier.)

give me the flowers while i'm living--

elder don clementine

p/s: fuck Steve Hoffman too (thread convergence)

I'm pretty familiar with Deacon's ravings on Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings, and schadenfreude doesn't begin to describe the pleasure I and others feel about what's happened/is happening to him in the wake of the Hatto hoax. It's so perfect that at first I had half a thought that this whole thing might have been cooked up to entrap that rat bastard. The great thing, as Clem said, is that Deacon's prior words are out there -- effusively praising Hatto; attacking (among other things, Deacon likes to tell Jewish RMCR contributors he doesn't like that they're revealing their "ethnic heritage") those who had any doubts about the provenance of Hatto's work; and of course, again as Clem points out, there are most deliciously his prior harsh assessments, in posts over the years, of the very pianists he went on to praise when their work was issued under Hatto's name. I think at one point he tried to explain this by saying that the various digital manipulations (e.g. speeding things up a bit without changing the pitch) that were used to somewhat disguise the original recordings when they were pirated and put out under Hatto's name amounted to striking improvements.

[brownie]

An interview with Joyce Hatto

Now see what happens when you try to purchase Hatto albums through MusicWeb!

[T.D.]

I'm pretty familiar with Deacon's ravings on Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings, and schadenfreude doesn't begin to describe the pleasure I and others feel about what's happened/is happening to him in the wake of the Hatto hoax. It's so perfect that at first I had half a thought that this whole thing might have been cooked up to entrap that rat bastard. The great thing, as Clem said, is that Deacon's prior words are out there...

What Larry said.

I haven't been reading r.m.c.r. for quite some time (oddly, I thought the ng rapidly went downhill as soon as Deacon appeared on the scene, though the "Studer troll" and other weirdos deserve credit), but I'm sure that TD (no relation, I assure you ) has been hoisted by innumerable of his own petards.

[David Ayers]

Here is the biography from Concert Artist website of the supposed conductor on Hatto's concerto recordings (now said to include, in reality, Salonen and Haitink, and no doubt others). Talk about cynical.

René Köhler

A survivor of the Holocaust gone missing in the murky wastelands and unspoken history of Cold War Europe, René Köhler (1926-2002) conducted Joyce’s concerto recordings during the ’90s, directing two ad-hoc studio orchestras – the National Philharmonic-Symphony and the 68-strong Warsaw Philharmonia.

‘Brought up in Weimar, René was a pupil of Raoul Koczalski [1884-1948, via his teacher Mikuli a direct descendent by tutelage of Chopin]. He was precocious, playing both Chopin concertos by the age of ten. In 1936, through Koczalski’s recommendation, he briefly continued studying music at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow. Failing to be awarded a government scholarship, he moved to Warsaw. In the Polish capital, unable to join the Conservatoire because of his Jewish faith, he studied privately with the pianist Stanisław Spinalski. In 1940 his left hand was crushed irreparably by a young German “officer”, so-called. He survived the Ghetto but in the summer of 1942 was deported to Treblinka [one of around 300,000 "resettled" over a period of 52 days between July and September]. Here [or in the vicinity - one of less than a hundred believed to have survived] he was found by the advancing Red Army [circa 1944]. Unimpressed by his mixture of Polish/French and German-Jewish stock, his Soviet interrogator sent him on a train heading East for a labour camp - where he remained from 1945 until 1970. Given his freedom, he returned to Warsaw, with the help of a Russian friend, to try and sort out his family property. He learnt that a small-holding, confiscated by the Nazis in 1940/41, had been allocated to a German family as part of a "Resettlement" scheme. Exacting "justice"/revenge/retribution on the resettled family in 1945 (they were killed), the new Polish government then impounded the place, later to form an integral part of a Communist Party Commune. René found that the Polish authorities refused to recognise the name "Köhler" as having Polish associations. Their Soviet counterparts meanwhile denied they’d ever "captured" or held him prisoner. The East Germans were not interested in the case, claiming that the Köhlers had left the Weimar area in 1936 of their own "freewill". In fact they’d fled, an old professor at the Hochschule (whose son was a Nazi Party member) having warned them, at personal risk, that they should leave Weimar since all Jews were to be rounded up the following year to be sent East. Three of the family had already been murdered. René kept such things to himself. He never desired any attention from the media. Physically he was a mess - probably why he used to add to his age to account for his appearance. He died from prostate cancer.’ [WB-C, adapted]

[Larry Kart]

Hatto's husband sure is an inventive s.o.b. I like "Rene kept things to himself."

[mandrill]

I like "Unimpressed by his mixture of Polish/French and German-Jewish stock, his Soviet interrogator sent him on a train heading East for a labour camp - where he remained from 1945 until 1970."

That's quite a piece. Whoever wrote it could sure make a living as a pulp fiction hack.

[J.A.W.]

I like "Unimpressed by his mixture of Polish/French and German-Jewish stock, his Soviet interrogator sent him on a train heading East for a labour camp - where he remained from 1945 until 1970."

That's quite a piece. Whoever wrote it could sure make a living as a pulp fiction hack.

The sad thing is that things like that really did happen at the end of World War II. How cynical can one get...

[Stefan Wood]

Classicstoday has a two part article on the story:

Hatto

[Claude]

This quote attributed to Hatto now seems kind of ironic:

THE LEGACY

‘What it really takes to be a pianist is courage, character, and the capacity to work. Shakespeare understood the entire human condition and so did the great composers.

As interpreters, we are not important; we are just vehicles. Our job is to communicate the spiritual content of life as it is presented in the music.

Nothing belongs to us; all you can do is pass it along. That's the way it is.’

Joyce Hatto, August 2005

http://www.musicweb-international.com/clas..._recordings.htm

Edited February 21, 2007 by Claude

[David Ayers]

and

music web 'critic' steps out

Thanks for posting the link. What a dunce. The only alternative for these guys who pretend to be so expert is to admit they missed all the obvious signs which others DID pick up on. But if they admit they had no idea what they were talking about then their self-ascribed 'authority' (which rests entirely on the ability to remember and mentally compare performances) vanishes. So they are coming out all guns blazing.

Sibelius claimed that no-one ever erected a monument to a critic, but the Hatto scandal is exactly that: R.I.P.

[zen archer]

in hip-hop they call that sampling.

[JSngry]

i don't even know if i should admit this on the interweb but as long you guys don't tell anyone--

back in my student days during a year in Budapest...

i had an affair with Ilonka Deckers-Küszler

But did or didn't you swallow René Kohler?

Mr. Howell claims he didn't, but I think he just doesn't want to blow his cover any more than he already has.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I trust that, in America, "magazines dedicated to civil war reenactment & build-yr-own-tube-amplifier" are kept on the shelf ABOVE the porn.

MG

[Epithet]

i don't even know if i should admit this on the interweb but as long you guys don't tell anyone--

back in my student days during a year in Budapest...

i had an affair with Ilonka Deckers-Küszler

But did or didn't you swallow René Kohler?

Mr. Howell claims he didn't, but I think he just doesn't want to blow his cover any more than he already has.

And just when I was thinking how nice it was that unknown orchestras could pass for the Vienna Philharmonic.

[bertrand]

Is there any proof she ever performed live? Did she actually ever make any recordings? Did she even exist?

Interesting...

Bertrand.

Edited February 23, 2007 by bertrand

[Larry Kart]

Yes, Clem, I did see the Alan Watkins un-masking. In some ways, this is even weirder than the Hatto thing, because the Hatto thing is probably in part a cold-blooded con for gain, in part (at least after a while) sheer madness, while the Watkins thing is so fusty/amiable Brit in tone yet no less elaborate and effortful and loony than the whole Hatto thing. I guess, it's all a living lesson in how flaming nuts seemingly ordinary people can be.

Edited February 23, 2007 by Larry Kart

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

So long as no one says Ron Smith doesn't/didn't exist...

MG

[Claude]

Revenge of the fraudster pianist (Daily Mail)

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Despite his lack of business acumen, Coupe went on to set up another label, Triumph Records, this time with Joe Meek, a record producer who became best known for Telstar, the 1962 hit by The Tornados. The pair later fell out and Meek left the company.

Meek would later gain notoriety himself. A paranoid depressive, who had already been charged with importuning for immoral purposes, he was terrified of being interviewed by police after they discovered a suitcase containing the mutilated body of a rent boy.

In 1967 he murdered his landlady with a shotgun before shooting himself.

Wow! Did I have a lucky escape when Meek wouldn't give me a job at 17?

Never knew that about him.

MG

[Larry Kart]

The Gramophone trumpets the supposed confession of Hatto's husband here:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTempla...newssectionID=1

but anyone with a brain can see that much of what the man says here has to be a skein of new self-serving, sympathy-begging fabulations. No doubt, he'll keep spinning things along in this manner until he ends up in court, if that should ever happen. Probably the whole "I did it to make my sick wife feel better" line is designed to fend off John Law.

[Claude]

Of course he had to release 100 CDs in 4 years to get his wife's talents finally recognized.