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Fantasia for Piano: Joyce Hatto's Incredible Career (2007)

Joyce Hatto’s incredible career.

In a subsequent posting, Deacon asserted his familiarity with nearly every celebrated performance of this piece—he’d been the producer of a two-hundred-CD set called “Great Pianists of the 20th Century”—and declared Hatto’s version superior: “It is just magical: light as a feather, fluent, colourful, textures limpid as a mountain spring, tonally luscious, rhythmically alive and bright. Within three years I had worn the ivories down and I was only ten”—but they “didn’t really think that life as a musician was terribly secure.” Bach was integral to her daily regimen, and she had a particular affinity for Chopin and Liszt, and had performed their works in Poland, at the peak of the Cold War, when she was invited to join an official delegation of Englishwomen. (Tantalizingly, shortly before Gramophone ’ s public disclosure someone calling himself Simon Lasso—in hindsight, an obvious play on László Simon—had warned participants on rec.music.classical.recordings, “Some of you are going to be looking very silly indeed over the coming weeks.”) Among shell-shocked Hattophiles, collective healing took the form of a debunking blitz, a competitive quest to unlock the mysteries of the ersatz oeuvre.

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