KEY POINTS:
On radio, Joyce Hatto sounded like my sweet old grandmother who used to save threepenny pieces for me in an old jam jar.
Hearing her talk to Murray Khouri on Radio New Zealand Concert last year, her life story sounded like prime material for an HBO Movie of
the Week.
Here was a valiant woman pianist, mid-career when diagnosed with cancer.
But she would survive for another 27 years and produce more than 100 recordings, which had critics stumbling over their own superlatives.
"Unalloyed mastery and musicianship" and "an awe-inspiring triumph of mind over matter," Bryce Morrison wrote in Gramophone. Another had her opening the cosmos of the Goldberg Variations.
Hatto died last year and now the cosmos has exploded.
Some of her performances, it turns out, have been appropriated from CDs by distinctly second-tier pianists.
In another case, a tape of some Godowsky recordings has been stretched by 15 per cent to transform the original pianist, Carlo Grante, into an unbelievably spry Hatto.
Can we look forward to a classical Cold Case as sleuths work through CD after CD, feeding them through computer after computer? Will they ever discover the identity of Rene Kohler, who conducts the orchestras in Hatto's concerto recordings?
The only identifiable person would seem to be Hatto's husband, William Barrington-Coupe, who is lying low.
As for motive, that is another mystery. Was there substantial money to be made from the venture? Highly unlikely, if one believes the doom-and-gloom tales of the industry.
Was it simply a matter of convenience, as when the perpetrators of the terrible 1958 film The Brain Eaters patched together a score from various Shostakovich symphony recordings?
Perhaps Hatto and Barrington-Coupe were trying their hands at prankster art, along the lines of Australian violinist Jon Rose, who was responsible for creating three musical generations of the Rosenberg family?
Once public outrage over the Hatto revelations has been satisfied, the theorists may well move in to give the whole thing an intellectual validation that Joyce might never have imagined.
And so the woman who once claimed she was inspired by the rain-forest monkeys when it came to relaxation, might have a new career in her afterlife.
