A British pianist who was belatedly hailed as a virtuoso in the final years of her life may have passed off recordings by better known musicians as her own, relates Reuters.

When Joyce Hatto died last June aged 77 after a 30-year battle with cancer which had prevented her from appearing in public since the early 1970s, she was described as one of the greatest British musicians ever.

Although she made her London debut in 1952 and built a solid reputation around performances of Chopin and Liszt, it was only in her final years that she was rediscovered by critics and hailed as a genius.

Her works, including the complete solo works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, were released by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, on the tiny Concert Artist label.

But now Gramophone magazine claims to have detected striking similarities between her renditions of famous classical works and those of others which raise questions about plagiarism.

These emerged when a critic put a compact disc of Hatto's rendition of Liszt's "12 Transcendental Studies" into his computer and his iTunes audio player identified it as a version by Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon.



Publication date: 20 February 2007   

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