I-Tunes Catches A Piano Plagiarist

Pianist Joyce Hatto was known as a middling pianist until, in 1989, she released a Liszt album that began, what was then thought to be, one of the greatest late career renaissances in classical music history. She later expanded her repertoire to cover the entirety of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Messiaen, and Prokofiev (making the breadth of her recordings larger than any but a handful of pianists). Her playing was particularly astounding, because her style would adapt and change with each performance, as if she became a different person for each piece. This has been revealed to be more true than previously realized.

A reader of the magazine Gramaphone reported that after attempting to play one of Hatto's recordings in his computer, his I-Tunes program identified the CD as an album recorded by Laszlo Simon, a Hungarian pianist. After listening to both, a critic from the magazine discovered that the recordings were identical. After further investigations, it has turned out that every single album she released since 1989 were rip-offs of recordings made by less established and younger performers. And this from a pianist once called "the greatest living pianist almost no one has heard of."

To read more, read here.

The Gramophone Magazine Expose is here.

[Hat-tip to Arts and Letters Daily]