ITunes exposes music fiddle

A BRITISH CONCERT pianist who made a name for herself in the final years of her life has been branded a fraud by iTunes.

Joyce Hatto, who died last year, had a fairly mediocre history of public performances when, due to a battle with cancer, she stopped performing concerts.

Then, in her final years more than 100 recordings with her name on them hit the shops to wide public acclaim.

Doubt was cast on the authenticity of these when a critic at the Gramophone magazine when he put a Hatto recording of Lizt's 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer.

Itunes calculates a disc id from the duration of the tracks before connecting to the Compact Disc Database online. And iTunes said reckoned the disc was recorded by another pianist, Lászlo Simon. After he dug up the Simon album he found it was the same as Hatto's.

Gramophone took Hatto's catalogue to audio company Pristine Audio who examined the waveforms of Hatto recordings and confirmed that while some are direct copies of other pianists, others had been tweaked by slowing them down.

Prisine Audio says it will investigate more of the albums and see if there are any more dubious ones. Hatto's husband, WH Barrington-Coupe, who produced and released them, says he cannot explain the similarities and is going to investigate.

More here. µ