The Joyce Hatto case (fake recordings)

[thebrix]

I am surprised this has not percolated into the general consciousness, because it is almost unbelievable stuff.

There have been fake musicians uncovered before (backing tape breaks down and the singing also stops) - but I have never heard of anything on such a big scale before - a real artist who stopped playing then had numbers of fake* recordings issued in their name:

http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html

The quality of the case for "the prosecution" is most impressive.

Something nobody has pointed out, to the best of my knowledge, is that the corpus of works is cleverly chosen. Most recordings are of unaccompanied piano music, and those that are not are, with one exception, with semi-professional orchestras where there is a huge turnover of personnel and thus unlikely to be an "institutional memory". (The exception is a Polish orchestra; geographically and linguistically separated from anyone who would be likely to check up).

Also, most of the music played is standard repertory, so it would be relatively difficult to pick out, from a large choice, the recordings used to create the fakes. (It is telling that one of the first fakes discovered was that of music by Godowsky, which is so difficult it is rarely heard and there are few recordings).

* I am 100% certain of this.