Cherished music wasn't hers: Husband admits to doctoring CDs

The Boston Globe reports:

An international classical music scandal that has built steadily over the past week and flared across the Internet broke open with a confession yesterday. Now it seems the remarkable story of pianist Joyce Hatto was, indeed, too good to be true.

While she was alive, Hatto's recording career appeared to be nothing short of a miracle. In a tale that was equal parts "Shine" and "The Natural," the reclusive pianist, who stopped performing concerts in the 1970s because of illness, became one of the most prolific classical recording artists of her time, with more than 100 CDs to her name.

In 2005, Richard Dyer, then a Boston Globe critic, wrote that Hatto "must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of." Hatto died of cancer at 77 last year, having developed, late in life, an enthusiastic following of music buffs .

But allegations of plagiarism erupted after a classical music listener in New York sent an e-mail two weeks ago to Jed Distler, a critic for Gramophone magazine and Classicstoday.com, saying that he had loaded a Hatto CD of Liszt's music into iTunes on his computer. Instead of Hatto, iTunes listed the player as Lászlo Simon, a little-known pianist based in Germany. (iTunes uses a database to identify discs.) Alerted by Distler, Gramophone hired audio expert Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio to investigate. By analyzing and matching up sound waves, Rose has so far found evidence that about a half dozen Hatto recordings feature performances by other artists.

No word yet from Women's Studies Departments on this one.