Digital music charlatan puts hands up

FOR POSSIBLY THE FIRST TIME in its illustrious history, posh music magazine The Gramophone has a news story on its hands.

As we reported earlier, William Barrington-Coupe, husband of deceased concert pianist Joyce Hatto, released digitally-tweaked copies of other pianists' work and passed it off as his wife's.

The stolen music received rave reviews - hardly surprising considering artists of the calibre of Laszlo Simon had their work ripped off - and today, Barrington-Coupe put his hands up and admitted he had stolen nearly all of it.

Until today, Barrington-Coupe had denied all the allegations of musical theft and insisted that the discs were all his wife's work.

Suffering from cancer, Joyce Hatto was unable to record a complete piece of music without grunting with pain, says the letter, the full text of which has not been made public.

Barrington-Coupe got around this by digitally editing in sequences from other pianists to replace the passages marred by grunts. He eventually realised it was easier to lift the entire piece rather than messing around with editing software and simply stretched or shrank the music in an attempt to disguise it.

But the miscreant now says he did not realise how a computer's media player attempts to identify a recording until it was too late and he was found out. He now 'deeply regrets' what has happened and admits he has acted stupidly, dishonestly and unlawfully. But he still claims that his late wife knew nothing of the scam.

He adds: "I'm tired, I'm not very well. I've closed the operation down, I've had the stock completely destroyed, and I'm not producing any more. Now I just want a little bit of peace."

But perhaps the strangest aspect of the tale is that BIS, the record company involved, says it is unlikely to take legal action against Barrington-Coupe, possibly because he doesn't have much money.

"I have no idea," says BIS boss Robert von Bahr, "Whether Barrington-Coupe is wealthy or not, and in any case, extracting damages from him might be very difficult. I'm not moved to seek revenge, but I'm very glad that the truth is at last known." µ

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