Sep
11
Mark Singer on Joyce Hatto
Filed Under Classical Music |
I’m sure a lot of you have already read Mark Singer’s absorbing account of the Joyce Hatto debacle in The New Yorker. If you don’t know what all this is about, here’s what happened, Cliff Notes style: Hatto is a concert pianist who, after a lengthy bout with cancer, died in 2006. Her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, had been putting out her discs, which were hailed by many critics as the output of a prolific musical genius. Well, it’s since been found out that Barrington-Coupe had cribbed from other pianists’ recordings to fashion Hatto’s performances on discs.
If there’s a cautionary message here somewhere, it is this: don’t fuck with GraceNote. Yes, the same GraceNote database system which automatically retrieves album info into your iTunes when you pop a CD in your computer. It turns out that one of the readers of Gramophone had inserted Hatto’s Rachmaninoff concerti disc into his computer, only to have GraceNote recognize the disc as Yefim Bronfman’s performance of Rachmaninoff.
It seems that Barrington-Coupe grew progressively bolder and more innovative in his forgeries. He was cutting-and-pasting different artists (Marc-Andre Hamelin, Minoru Nojima, etc.) to create a compelling, composite performance by a singular pianist, Joyce Hatto. This is no mean feat, as Mark Singer astutely recognizes and comments on Barrington-Coupe’s “accomplishment” -
With his collection of more than a hundred Joyce Hatto CD’s, Barry had created the most diversely prolific and gifted pianist to emerge in decades, with a corresponding narrative that aroused the esteem and good will of music lovers around the world… The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto into “Joyce Hatto” was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.
Does this ring a bell, fiction readers It should, if you’re fond of William Gaddis, especially The Recognitions. In Gaddis’ novel, Wyatt Gwyon, who has the uncanny ability to reproduce paintings by the Flemish masters, says this -
Originality is not invention but a sense of recall, recognition, patterns already there.
What do you do in the presence of a fake which transcends the original You either laugh or shudder.
(Image: Detail from “The Portrait of Maria Portinari,” by Hans Memling)
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