Plagiarism follow-up
Last week, Mike posted about the curious case of Joyce Hatto, the famed pianist who after retiring in the 1970's, released many new recordings in the 1990's.
A Gramophone magazine writer found that the Gracenotes database used by iTunes matched a supposed Hatto recording to another performance by a pianist named László Simon. The Washington Post now reports that William Barrington-Coupe, Hatto's widower, has confessed to plagiarizing recordings. Wikipedia's entry on Hatto currently lists a couple of dozen alleged copies from performances by artists including Dubravka Tomsic, Yuki Matsuzawa, Konstantin Scherbakov, and others.
Barrington-Coupe says he has now destroyed all of his labels' recordings, but given that there are more than a hundred performances attributed to Hatto, it will take time for the music historians to sort out the actual from the borrowed.
