Some of you may have heard about the recent scandal about the British classical pianist Joyce Hatto (1928-2006), over a slew of piano CDs that appeared with her credited as the recording artist. She stopped performing in public in the 1970s because of ill health, presumed related to cancer. However, in the last years of her life, a bunch of CDs appeared, produced by her husband William Barrington-Coupe (how British a name, that) on the Concert Artists label. These CDs got rave reviews from a host of critics. However, things were not what they appeared to be. More below the flip....
It turns out that many, if not all, of those Concert Artist CDs "performed by Joyce Hatto" were plagarized from other pianists' recordings. You can read the history of this and very good summations at Andrys Basten's web site (tip of the virtual hat to Jessica Duchen's blog for links) and the Wikipedia entry, for example. Another long and provocative article that Duchen links to is this one from Christopher Howell. Duchen had this recent article in The Independent on this scandal.
For a while, Barrington-Coupe denied any fraud, but eventually, he fessed up, after a fashion, in a letter to the Swedish classical label BIS and its owner, Robert von Bahr. Gramophone magazine then put this story on line here. One money quote regarding loserdom is from that 2/26 Gramophone article:
"Barrington-Coupe, however, says he did not know about the process whereby a computer's media player seeks to identify a recording, until it was too late."
This whole thing began to unravel when a listener put a CD into his computer and saw that the artist name on the CD (László Simon) was not the advertised name (Joyce Hatto). This sort of reminds me of one episode of Columbo when Peter Falk trips up William Shatner by saying something like:
'You wiped your fingerprints off the gun, sir, but you forgot one thing. You forgot to clean the bullets.'
Robert von Bahr had a statement on his label's site, dated February 23, before Barrington-Coupe's confessional letter to him, stating that assuming this plagarism was true (which it turned out to be, and with just a touch of subtle snark (bold mine) at the end):
"....I would be most interested in the background to this theft. Given the circumstances surrounding Ms. Hatto's sickness and fate, there may be deeply felt - if misguided - personal reasons for it. Unless further, aggravating circumstances are discovered, we do therefore not intend to take any legal steps against those responsible for the possible infringement of the copyright of BIS Records.
In the meantime, all credit is due to László Simon for having created Hatto's benchmark recording."
von Bahr is playing the 'nice guy' here, perhaps with tongue in cheek, but I would think that he did leave himself wiggle room to take legal action. It's safe to say that he's no fool, from this quote from Geoff Edgers' article in the 2/27 Boston Globe:
'Von Bahr said he spoke to Simon yesterday morning and urged him to take advantage of the publicity. "He has gotten more PR than he would get in five lifetimes," von Bahr said. "This is the time for him to go out and get those concerts."
Given how minimal sales of classical CDs are compared to pop CDs, it seems not worth it in terms of money to take this to the courts, from what von Bahr wrote. But with firms like Sony/BMG, Decca/Universal, Telarc or Naxos...well, I don't know what they think. Hyperion Records, which is especially sensitive to issues of copyright after their battle over copyright a few years back with Lionel Sawkins, isn't so sanguine as von Bahr, from the same Telegraph article:
"I feel we should do something, although it will cost a lot of money to bring him to court. We need to get to the bottom of it and get a list of all the recordings he's pirated."
I don't blame him if he wants to try to take out Barrington-Coupe totally, especially as David Hurwitz on the Classics Today website writes about this situation:
"The selection of labels from which to filch the music, emphasizing non-British artists and smaller companies with limited distribution, positively reeks of a very carefully calculated, long term plan. It goes beyond the sort of caution required merely to avoid detection at home and please a dying woman.....Barrington-Coupe seems to have a flair for finding and exploiting the cracks in a flawed system, and for preying on people's trust and sympathy. One thing, however, is certain: he is a liar, and not likely to change his stripes in a sudden fit of remorse. He is walking through a door that was opened for him, as he seems to have done throughout his career, and the fact that his excuses may appear reasonable does not make them truthful.
Barrington-Coupe doesn't help himself much, or is truly delusional (or something else), from this quote a Telegraph article by Martin Beckford on 2/27:
"I don't consider I've hurt anybody. A lot of attention has been drawn to forgotten artists."
Uh, yeah, right (NOT). Denis Dutton, a conservative-leaning (sorry) professor of philosophy in New Zealand, begs to differ at his website, and had a milder NYT Op-Ed last month on the 26th.
Through all this, the awful circumstances of Hatto's illness no doubt had an effect on how people looked at the CDs, and von Bahr's relatively mild attitude mentioned above. But this doesn't negate the fact that Barrington-Coupe, and by extension Hatto, did wrong, big time. As larger world events tell us, cherry-picking selected bits of information to justify your cause is fraught with peril, whatever your intentions.
The whole premise of releasing this kind of product for sale in the marketplace, and indeed underlying much of everyday human conduct, is trust, as Hurwitz mentioned. We like to operate on the assumption that when we see an item on the shelf in the store, or world leaders undertake major actions in foreign policy, that what we are being told about them is done honestly, without lies or distortion, and in good faith. Paul Kim, one of the pianists whose recordings were plagarized, said as much in a letter to the NYT in response to Dutton's op-ed:
"This scandal is a moral and legal issue since it is, in a larger sense, a public one. The music-buying public is deceived as to the true identity of the actual artists whose CDs it has bought. I feel some sense of redemption in that the real artists are now being identified and given credit, albeit retroactively." (NYT, March 2, 2007)
When that good faith is violated.....well, I'll leave you to fill in the rest.
This is, of course, yet another seriously frivolous/frivolously serious SNLC from self (who is a loser, after all), but this was a story that cried out to be recounted here, and wasn't covered on DK, for admittedly understandable reasons. In the grand scheme of things, the particular subject here is trivial (further proving the loserness of the diarist ;) ). But the subtexts implicit in this story are not, and connect to wider issues that are discussed every day on DK, when it comes to policy and politics.
OK, now that you're thoroughly exhausted from reading this, you know the usual SNLC drill (I expect loser stories this week to have nothing to do with plagarized recordings - I hope)....