Alleged Hatto plagiarism shakes music world

The name of Joyce Hatto began making the rounds of music magazines and websites a few years ago. An obscure British pianist, Hatto stopped performing publicly in 1976, suffering from cancer. She then reportedly dedicated herself to recording vast reams of the piano literature, releasing more than 100 CDs on the small Concert Artists label, run by Hatto's husband, William Barrington-Coupe . The hard-to-find discs began to garner near-universal acclaim from an array of critics praising her musical imagination and seemingly flawless technique, and a cult following quickly developed. In a 2005 story, the Globe's Richard Dyer said Hatto "must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of." (She died last year.)

That was the inspiring story, until last week. Now it has become a detective story -- and a scandal, spurred by charges of plagiarism on a vast scale, that has flashed through the classical music community. In a recent e-mail to the Globe, Barrington-Coupe continued to defend his late wife's recordings.

The story's bizarre turn started when listener Brian Ventura put Hatto's recording of Liszt's 12 "Transcendental Études" into his computer. His iTunes software identified the disc not as Hatto's recording but as one by Laszlo Simon on the BIS label, originally issued in 1993. (iTunes uses a database called CDDB to identify discs using information about the number and length of the tracks.) Ventura compared the Hatto recordings with excerpts of the Simon recordings he found on Amazon.com's website, and thought that they sounded remarkably similar.

He then contacted Jed Distler , a critic for Classicstoday.com and Gramophone magazine, who had highly praised many of Hatto's recordings. Distler made a detailed comparison between the Hatto and Simon recordings and concluded that in 10 of the 12 études, they seemed to be one and the same.

Distler then e-mailed James Inverne, editor of Gramophone. Inverne, in turn, contacted audio-restoration expert Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio , who compared the sound waves of the two Liszt recordings. He reported that in 10 études the sound waves were identical. In addition, he concluded that one of the other two études was actually the work of a Japanese pianist named Minoru Nojima .

Gramophone broke the story last week on its website, and a longer article is promised in a future issue of the magazine. As other Hatto recordings came under suspicion, Rose has begun tracking down what he argues are their real sources. (see pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html ) The results, if true, are damning.

A recording of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto is credited to Hatto and the "National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra" under a conductor named René Köhler. Actually, sonic evidence suggests that it is the well-known recording by pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Vienna Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink . Rachmaninoff's Second and Third Concertos with Hatto and Köhler? Nope, says Rose, it's really Yefim Bronfman , Esa-Pekka Salonen , and the Philharmonia, released on Sony in 1992. On Classicstoday.com, editor David Hurwitz claims that Hatto's entire Ravel cycle is, in fact, the work of French pianist Roger Muraro . The Internet is abuzz with more allegations, and it has been difficult to locate any reliable information about the orchestra and conductor with whom Hatto allegedly recorded.

In the face of the tempest, Barrington-Coupe maintains that all of Hatto's recordings are authentically hers. In an e-mail to the Globe, he stated that "I obviously cannot agree with what is being suggested. My ears tell me differently but I have been surprised at the 'findings' of some of the technological examinations that I have looked at on screen." He added that he is having his own technical comparison carried out and hopes to have the results soon.

If the accusations prove true, it would constitute artistic fraud on a scale unlike anything classical music has ever known. We will have come a long way from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's lending some high C's to Kirsten Flagstad's recording of "Tristan und Isolde."

Digital technology has now made it easy to do something much more troubling. You don't need to steal the original tapes of a recording session to pass someone's work off as your own. Instead, it seems to be about as simple as copying a CD.

A final irony is that if Hatto's recordings are fakes, somebody is likely to cash in on them. As of this writing, a CD of her Chopin Études was being offered on eBay, the seller noting the current controversy. The starting bid was $39.95.

There always seemed to be something too good to be true about Hatto's story. Now it may turn out that it was.

Osvaldo Golijov's latest conquest in the music world is New York's Mostly Mozart festival. The festival, which runs July 31 to Aug. 25, has named Golijov as its first composer-in-residence. Opening night will feature the New York premiere of his "Azul" for cello and orchestra, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered last summer at Tanglewood. The "St. Mark Passion ," also a BSO commission and his first major triumph, is on the bill for Aug. 18 and 19. Some of the performers will also participate in a late-night concert on Aug. 19, with a program yet to be announced. See lincolncenter.org.

The ever-audacious Callithumpian Consort and its sister ensemble, [nec]shivaree , are embarking on a yearlong exploration of the music of Alvin Lucier , an experimental composer whose works explore the acoustic environments in which they're performed. As Stephen Drury, the ensembles' director, puts it, "His music explores the interaction of the acoustic event and the psychology of the listener." The first concert in the series is this Sunday at 3 p.m., featuring the excellently titled "Quasimodo the Great Lover. " Brown Hall, New England Conservatory; callithumpian.org