Fantasia for Piano

letter from englaNd faNTaSia for piaNO Joyce Hatto’s incredible career. by MaRK SiNgER n the summer of 1989, in Royston, music labels that helped establish the England, a man named William Bar- form—known as the “super-bargain” rington-CoupeI cheerfully received a classical LP. Such recordings, which visitor from Germany: Ernst Lumpe, a retailed for roughly a dollar apiece, were high-school teacher, fervent music a wellspring of artful pseudonyms— lover, and record collector. For a couple Paul Procopolis, Giuseppe Parolini, the of years, the two men had sustained a Cincinnati Pro Arte Philharmonic, the correspondence that consisted mainly of Munich Greater State Symphony— Barrington-Coupe, a former classical- and Barry is credited with coining the music agent and a peripatetic record wittiest of all: Wilhelm Havagesse (con- producer, responding to Lumpe’s ques- ducting Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Schehe- tions about the authenticity of various razade,” as rendered by the spurious arcane LPs. Zurich Municipal Orchestra). The During the nineteen-fifties and six- small labels that Barry worked at had a ties, a number of record companies in tendency to run aground financially, England and America had a practice— but perhaps his most dependable asset questionable but nodded and winked was his resilience—a facility for dusting at—of repackaging LPs by established himself off and moving on to the next artists as the work of fictitious perform- venture. ers and selling the recordings at a deep Among Lumpe’s fifteen thousand discount. Barrington-Coupe, known LPs, many of which he bought second- to familiars as Barry, worked at several hand, were about five hundred of murky Above left: an undated photograph of Joyce Hatto. 66 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 17, 2007 TNY—2007_09_17—PAGE 66—133SC.—livE ArT r16453rD at lEfT, CriTiCAl CuT To bE watchED ThrouGhouT ENTirE PrESS ruN! PlS uSE NoN rD image for Color.—livE ArT r16572_rD at riGhT. CriTiCAl CuT To bE watchED ThrouGhouT ENTirE PrESS ruN! PlS uSE NoN rD image for Color—#2 PAGE Above: Her husband and producer, William Barrington-Coupe, at home in Royston, Hertfordshire. Photograph by Steve Pyke. TNY—2007_09_17—PAGE 67—133SC.—livE ArT r16572_rD at riGhT. CriTiCAl CuT To bE watchED ThrouGhouT ENTirE PrESS ruN! PlS uSE NoN rD image for Color provenance. A punctilious collector, he compact disks derived from old re- (the longer of two versions that Rach- wanted to know the true identities be- cordings, including many from its back maninoff wrote). Lumpe expressed ad- hind the masquerades. He had a partic- catalogue of LPs. Whatever commerce miration, only to be told, “Well, I’ve ular interest in an Italian pianist, Sergio Barry conducted was a cottage indus- fooled you a little. I made a little joke. Fiorentino, and was compiling a dis- try, the cottage in question being a red That’s not actually Joyce, it’s Andrei cography. Many Fiorentino recordings brick house on a quiet street in an ex- Gavrilov”—a former winner of the In- had been released on Barry’s principal urban village an hour north of London. ternational Tchaikovsky Competition. label, Concert Artist, and his work had He kept audio-editing equipment in Barry smiled. “But now here’s Joyce,” he often been appropriated and reissued an upstairs room. Downstairs, in the said, and he put in another cassette, a pseudonymously. Lumpe had turned to music room, which was furnished with different performance of the same ca- Barry for help in separating fact from a pair of grand pianos, Hatto gave pri- denza. It was a lighthearted, insignificant fiction. vate lessons; she had also taught at a jest, Lumpe thought, hardly a test or By the time the two men met, Barry nearby girls’ school. a ruse. was no longer a visible presence on the Barry still possessed a discerning classical-music scene, nor was his wife, ear and a comprehensive knowledge of fter their meeting, Lumpe re- Joyce Hatto, a talented pianist who classical music, and he responded with mained in touch with Barry, whose had achieved modest recognition as a gratifying specificity (and candor) to lettersA often included music-world gos- concert performer but hadn’t played in Lumpe’s queries. Though recovering sip or bulletins about his or Hatto’s public in more than a decade. The only from recent heart surgery, Barry was a health. Barry found rare 78s and LPs for Hatto recording Lumpe owned was a prodigious talker. Their conversation Lumpe’s collection, inquired about 1970 release of the “Symphonic Varia- lasted most of a day. Toward the end, Lumpe’s children, furnished seeds from tions,” by Arnold Bax, a lesser-known Hatto joined the discussion. A slender, his flower garden. Among the record- twentieth-century British composer unassuming woman in her early sixties, ings he sent were works by Liszt and whose neo-Romantic works are unusu- with dark eyes and dense eyebrows, a Chopin that Hatto had played many ally ornate. fine jawline, and a dimpled smile, she years earlier, in concert. Several weeks According to Concert Artist’s cata- volunteered a few observations about after his trip to Royston, Lumpe also logue, the company’s founding ob- Fiorentino, but she spoke so quickly received in the mail a tape of a piano jective was to provide “a sounding that Lumpe had trouble understand- arrangement of Edward Elgar’s First board for young British talent sadly ne- ing her. Symphony—from a Hatto recital, Barry glected” by the major record compa- At a moment when she wasn’t in the said, that had taken place recently in nies. But Barry had produced few new room, Barry offered to play an excerpt Cambridge. recordings since the early seventies. of a more recent recording of Hatto’s: This was unexpected: hadn’t Joyce To the extent that Concert Artist re- Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Hatto retired from concertizing years mained active, it was mainly as a recy- He placed a cassette in a tape deck and earlier? A thank-you note to Barry elic- cling operation, issuing cassettes and they listened to its dizzying cadenza ited more details: The second half of the concert was the Liszt piano transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which, unfortunately, “was not recorded due to some stupidity of the University Recording engineer.” But Barry had pressed the buttons himself in time to capture her encore, Liszt’s transcription of the “William Tell Overture.” For some reason, he hadn’t included a copy of this recording. Lumpe filed Hatto’s Elgar First Symphony among his several hundred cassette and reel-to-reel tapes. As a piano omnivore, Lumpe wel- comed the advent of online group dis- cussions and became a frequent con- tributor to Yahoo groups and a Usenet/ Google newsgroup, rec.music.classical.recordings, where participants em- braced a hodgepodge of musical topics and the tenor of conversations ranged from meticulously informative to flam- ingly combative. In the comparatively “Did he have any known enemies?” genteel Yahoo group ThePiano, one TNY—2007_09_17—PAGE 68—133SC.—livE ArT A12354—#3 page—CArTooN ChANGE AND CAPTioN ADDED popular amusement was the blind lis- tening quiz, in which an unidentified musical selection was uploaded and members critiqued the performance. In November, 2002, Lumpe posed a different type of quiz: “Look at the quite impressive list below and guess which pianist has recorded all these works over roughly the last fifteen years.” The list implied an artist with exceptional breadth, depth, and stam- ina: Bach (Goldberg Variations), Bee- thoven (complete piano concertos, complete piano sonatas, complete bag- atelles), Brahms (piano concertos), Chopin (complete works for solo piano and for piano and orchestra, complete mazurkas, nocturnes, and polonaises), Schubert (complete piano sonatas), Liszt (complete etc.), a lot of Rachmaninoff and Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Mozart, “Oh, I meant when are we going to get off this Mussorgsky, Saint-Saëns, Schumann, merry-go-round in a larger sense.” Tchaikovsky. No one guessed correctly, so Lumpe volunteered the answer: Joyce Hatto. It •• had been a trick question. These works had been recorded, he explained, but Next, Lumpe uploaded an excerpt preëminent interpreter of Rachmani- few were commercially available. In re- from a Hatto recording that Concert noff—as she “knew him well.” Deacon cent years, it seemed, Concert Artist Artist had released in 2002: Rach- continued, “His influence shows. Also, and Hatto had quietly embarked upon maninoff ’s transcription of the Scherzo the piano she uses for the recording is a major endeavor. With Barry acting as from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer the piano which Rachmaninoff used in producer, Hatto had tackled a prodi- Night’s Dream.” At least one group the U.K. when he was on tour there.” As gious repertoire in the studio. It was an member, Tom Deacon, was prompted 2002 ended, Deacon volunteered a sum- unlikely undertaking for a woman now to buy a copy of the CD. In a subsequent mary of ThePiano’s accomplishments in her early seventies, made odder by the posting, Deacon asserted his familiarity for the year and crowed, “We ‘discov- fact that Barry had expended little effort with nearly every celebrated perfor- ered’ a seventy-four-year-old pianist to market the records. mance of this piece—he’d been the pro- by the name of Joyce Hatto who plays ducer of a two-hundred-CD set called everything!” articipants in the Yahoo group “Great Pianists of the 20th Century”— Lumpe’s next Hatto upload, an ex- demanded to know more about and declared Hatto’s version superior: “It cerpt from Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz Hatto,P who wasn’t even mentioned in is just magical: light as a feather, fluent, No.

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