A Deeper Mystery

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 3:58 PM Eastern on 1 Mar. See below.]

Now that the Hatto cat is out of the bag, so to speak, questions before only glancingly touched on concerning why music critics who praised the bogus Hatto recordings didn't themselves pick up on the fraud are already being raised anew. What I find more interesting, however — quite astonishing, actually — is that not one of the living pianists whose recorded performances were surreptitiously used for those bogus discs seems to have noticed the imposture. That those pianists at one time or another must have heard those bogus recordings which were in reality their own is almost a certainty given the critical raves the bogus recordings received from the critical press accompanied by Hatto's highly publicized tragic back-story, so it can't be the case that those pianists were unaware of the recordings' existence. That Hatto's husband, Barrington-Coupe, subtly altered the performance timings on some of them should have made little difference. If nothing else, every recorded performance has a number of unintended tiny quirks or tiny slips, real or imagined, of which the performer himself may be the only one aware. To that performer, however, they would be unmistakable in the listening, and it would be too much for him to have imagined that another performer made exactly those same tiny quirks or slips in exactly the same places. So how is it not one of those pianists saw cause to question what they were hearing when listening to those bogus discs?

Is a puzzlement.

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Update (8:58 PM Eastern on 27 Feb): Alex Ross suggests an answer.

While I don't at all question Alex's facts, I do question they would apply to professional concert pianists, a routine part of whose job is to keep tabs on the competition — most especially the competition who've released recordings of works also recorded by them (the professional concert pianists), and which competition's recordings have not only received critical raves in the music press, but raves accompanied by a sensational if tragic back-story.

In short, Alex's answer doesn't sound entirely persuasive to me.

Update 2 (3:58 PM Eastern on 1 Mar): Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily, has up on his personal website a brief supplement to his New York Times op-ed piece on the Hatto affair. It's tough stuff, but I think spot-on. At this point I'd go even further and say that I suspect that Hatto was not only in on the caper from the beginning, but in fact instigated it. The evidence for her involvement is all circumstantial, it's true, but persuasive nevertheless — if not beyond a reasonable doubt, by the preponderance of the evidence.