A forensic use for iTunes

There are extraordinary goings-on in classical music, discussed at some length on this morning's CD Review on BBC Radio 3 . It is a technological detective story. Brian Ventura, put a CD of Lisztz's Transcendental Etudes, played by Joyce Hatto in his computer; the CDDB database iTunes uses decided it was by Lászlo Simon instead. He contacted the Gramophone, and tests were performed on recordings attributed to Hatto by Pristine Audio and Royal Holloway College's AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). These demonstrated that the recording sold under Hatto's name on her husband W.H. Barrington-Coupe's Concert Artist/Fidelio label are not by her but by other pianists. Hatto died last year and, the public were told, had been ill with cancer since the 1970s, causing her withdrawal form performance until the late flowering that the Concert Artists recordings purported to document. Barrington-Coupe, who has yet to make a statement on the recordings, served a prison sentence for tax evasion, according to the Daily Telegraph.
See the Guardian's obituary at the time of her death, for an example of some of the praise lavished on her recordings.

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