Widower admits faking wife's piano recordings

In the last years of her life, Joyce Hatto was described as "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of."

While suffering from the advanced stages of ovarian cancer in her 70s, she released 104 recordings of works by Chopin, Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven, to worldwide critical acclaim.

When she died last year, The Independent praised her "superhuman energy and diversity of repertory", while mourning "the tragedy of her career; why so many for so long failed to credit her achievement."

But yesterday, her husband, William Barrington-Coupe admitted that he had passed off other pianists' work under his wife's name. He said he wanted to give her the illusion of a great end to an "unfairly overlooked career".

An investigation by Gramophone magazine this month identified four of her recordings that were identical to recordings by other artists. A Hatto rendition of Liszt's "Transcendental Studies" was identified as being exactly the same as a recording by pianist Laszlo Simon released on BIS records.

Mr Barrington-Coupe initially denied all allegations, and said he was present at all major recording sessions. But in a letter to the head of BIS records he made a full confession.

In the letter, Mr Barrington-Coupe said that as the compact disc superseded the cassette, he tried to transfer his wife's recordings on to the new format, without success. So the couple made the decision to re-record her work.

But Hatto was suffering from the late stages of cancer, and the recording sessions were marred with her involuntary grunts of pain.

Inspired by the story of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf covering the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the famous EMI recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Mr Barrington-Coupe found a solution that would enable his wife to keep working. He started by inserting small patches of recordings to cover his wife's grunts of pain, but then began using longer sections of borrowed music, sourcing recordings that had similarities with his wife's style of playing.

In his letter to Robert von Bahr, head of BIS records, he said that he was unaware of the process where a computer's media player can identify a recording, and that ultimately led to his deception being revealed.

He maintains that his wife never knew of his deception, and that when she received admiration from classical music critics just months before her death, she said: "It's all too late."

It remains unclear exactly how much of the London-born pianist's work, that brought her such belated acclaim, is actually the real Hatto.

An editorial in Gramophone magazine said: "What music lovers will want, and what [Mr Barrington-Coupe] must surely now provide (together, where possible, with witnesses who can verify), is a full and accurate list of which Joyce Hatto recordings actually feature Joyce Hatto, and which other artists were involved where appropriate. Only then will we know how good she actually was, and only then can at least some of her reputation be salvaged."

Mr Barrington-Coupe voiced his regret for his actions, saying: "I'm desperately unhappy that foolish decisions I made then to make her last months happier have dragged her name into the mire as well."