verging_on_random

Hats off to Hatto

March 2, 2007 on 3:30 pm | In Uncategorized |

I take childish pleasure in seeing self-proclaimed experts being made to look foolish. For some reason I feel this way especially about the pretentious snobs who have been retained as ‘critics’ in what you might call the finer things in life.

Years ago you would read stories occasionally about wine experts wrongly identifying Riverland flagon wine as a French burgundy in a blind tasting or something similar, and it always gave me a good laugh, specially if they were the same experts who habitually bagged the kind of wines I liked to drink. Same with food - you know, you just think you’ve discovered a really tasty new line in frozen vanilla yoghurt until some dick comes along and writes a column about how inferior the taste of artificial vanilla is compared to the real thing ($5 a bean at specialty food stores called trendy names like arsewipe_the_grocer of Double Bay).

Anyway one of my pet hates is the critic who deflates your enjoyment of a concert or recording by telling you you it failed to get to the core of the music, or lacked the insights and drama and excitement or whatever of the legendary recording made by the Kracow Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Georg von Richthofen in his last appearance on the podium before he was called to the front in 1939. It’s a real downer to find a piece of music that I really like and then read that my version is total crap.

So the Joyce Hatto affair has had me chuckling something fierce. You see this Joyce Hatto was a promising classical pianist who unfortunately got sick with cancer years and years ago and could no longer appear in public. Nevertheless gallant Joyce (she was English BTW, I doubt if this could have happened in any other country) continued to record in the studio. Under the guidance of her husband she fought through the pain to make CDs of many of her favourite works, which were duly released for public sale.

The critics loved her. They’ve been raving about her for ages. Just like snobs everywhere they’ve seized on this obscure artist and made her their own … so superior to those well-known names that the unwashed masses think are wonderful. Take for example a review in the December, 2006 edition of Gramophone magazine, perhaps the most respected classical music publication in the world (and they would be the first to acknowledge the fact). It’s a review of some releases by Earl Wild, a very popular pianist who’s widely admired but he is, well you know, American:

… he does not combine textual observations with musical poetry as effectively as Perahia, Lugansky or above all, Joyce Hatto.

Get it? Joyce is not just good in this repertoire, she’s the best.

Then in the same publication there’s a review by a dude called Bryce Morrison. Bryce may well be a terrific bloke for all I know but he writes a monthly column in The Gramophone and I have to say he comes across as a patronising prat. Quite full of himself, to use our prime minister’s turn of phrase. Here’s what Bryce has to say about a recent release of Joyce’s:

… you can only marvel at the glory of Hatto’s reading. Her playing recreates Messiaen’s vision with a fervour and generosity unknown to even her finest competitors (Peter Serkin, Steven Osborne).

You’ll notice that once again, Joyce is not just great but the greatest. And critics would know, they sometimes write long ‘building a library’ articles when they tell you not to waste your money on this or that or the other version of a work (mine usually get knocked out in the qualifying rounds) but to make sure you get this one (sample prose … ‘a self-sufficient, thrilling Seventh that renders classical-modernist dialectic temporarily irrelevant’ … and to think I bought an inferior version just cos I had a positive emotional response to the music).

Anyway you get the picture, Joyce is just brilliant and not to be compared with any other pianist. Except it turns out that she actually was another pianist . Several other pianists in fact.

Yep, Joyce died not long ago (she was 77, so the cancer couldn’t have been all that serious I guess) and now the scandal has broken. It turns out that an unknown number of Joyce’s alleged recordings were actually pinched from records released by other pianists, which makes the critics who purported to evaluate her work compared to others and rate it superior … well the word ‘goose’ springs to mind.

The really funny thing is the way someone cottoned on to the scam. They whacked one of ‘her’ CDs into a PC and when it started to play, the correct original track information came up on the screen . I guess the $15,000 Krell CD players that the critics use don’t have enough useful facilities after all … no doubt they would say that displaying the track info detracts from the sound quality.

I think the whole affair is a hoot. Apparently it was Mr Hatto who was responsible for the scam and they’re busy trying to work out what, if anything, they can actually charge him with. I hope he gets away with it. It’s kind of a classical music version of the Ern O’Malley thing, and it might teach the critics a bit of humility, well for a month or two at least.

Enjoy the weekend all