A bizarre plagiarism story: Joyce Hatto, a popular classical pianist diagnosed with cancer in the 70s, used the private studio of her husband to record performances throughout the 90s when she was too sick to perform in public. A while ago an editor at Gramophone magazine popped a Hatto CD into his computer. The computer misidentified the CD, tagging it as a CD by László Simon. Except it wasn’t misidentified; while trying to find the problem the writer discovered that Hatto had been stealing the tracks from other pianists and selling them as her own for a while. Apparently all of her 90s work consists of recordings by other pianists. Sometimes the tracks have been time-stretched to hide their true origins, sometimes they’re renditions by obscure artists. But most of them are simply 1 to 1 copies of other peoples works. (via)
7 August 2008