Cat and Shanmao's blog

Unless you follow classical recordings closely you might not have heard of Joyce Hatto. Well, her story is likely to be the biggest scandal to rock the classical music world in a long time and will hopefully re-invigorate it.

You can read the details and follow links to more details at this webpage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Hatto

The story is that Joyce Hatto was a classical pianist of minor note, born in 1928, who was forced to retire from the concert stage in 1976 due to cancer, never to perform in public again. She struggled with the disease for decades and finally passed away in June 2006.

Starting in 1989 her husband began recording her playing and releasing albums of these recordings on an obscure label. In the past few years these recordings have emerged from obscurity to be heralded by leading classical music magazines, such as Gramaphone, and she has been described as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century and also as the greatest pianist no one has ever heard of.

Fans wondered how someone battling cancer could record huge swathes of the classical piano repertoire so masterfully, including many recordings that amount to pianistic summitings of Everest. For the concertos she recorded, no one had heard of the conductor, Rene Kohler, with whom she collaborated.

Fast forward to Jan and Feb 2007. A fan popped in one of her cds into his computer and the computer listed the recording as being one made by a Hungarian pianist and not Joyce Hatto. One thing led to another and now many of her recordings have been revealed to be copies of pre-existing recordings by famous and not-so-famous performers. Her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, was the recording engineer and the sole person who ever heard her play for the recordings. Each of the released cds had taken a performance by say an Ashkenazy, sped up or slowed down the tracks, added some reverb, perhaps threw in a few tracks from a different performer then was released.

Websites now feature side by side comparisons of her recordings with the original from which they were taken. If you listen to the posted soundtracks, these websites have Hatto's recording played in the right ear and the original played in the left ear. There is no perceptible difference.

Naturally, the critics who praised her now look like fools, the artists and labels who's work was copied are mad (although the more obscure artists should be thankful that their names will be lifted from obscurity by this scandal).

Some questions remain. Was Hatto aware of any of this? Her husband was the point of communication and may have perpetrated the hoax on his own. What was the motivation? Purely money? Or prestige? Did Hatto actually record anything over the past few decades? Perhaps she could play much of the repertoire but the quality was not that good so some misguided middle-men (her husband most likely) swapped recordings?

Follow the above link to find more.

btw, I've also updated the sheet music link page with some new interesting sites, plus removed some now defunct sites:

http://guimatthew.com/music/sheetmusic.htm

I work directly with a lot of Indian immigrants and remotely (via phone conferences) with Indian workers in my company's Bangalore offices.

I sent an email to one co-worker in India asking him to get a sign off from relevant people before making certain changes in our software. He wrote back saying he was unaware of any requirement to get a 'sign off' and quoted the phrase 'sign off'. He was obviously annoyed.

I didn't worry about it too much but thought it was unfortunate that keeping all the people who have a stake in some work in the loop seemed difficult.

A few days later my manager who is from India talked to me and tried to give his interpretation of the co-workers reaction.

He didn't know if any of the phrases I used were offensive but was wondering if they were. He used an example from an interaction between our former director and a VP that didn't go as well as planned due to poor choice of wording. Our former director had presented some information to this VP and then asked 'does that make sense to you'? My manager noticed that the VP immediately became tense and more hostile to the presentation. He explained that our former director, who was born and raised in the US, hadn't realized that the VP, who was born and raised and presumably educated in India, would take offense at the phrase 'does that make sense to you'. Apparently, some Indians (probably not all) when arguing will begin to use the word 'sense'. As in 'you are not making sense'. He said however that even using the word in a non-negative context turns the conversation into more of an argument: "Am I making sense", "Does that making sense to you", "You are not making sense". Basically 'sense' is a keyword that is a signal that a disagreement and perhaps an insult is happening.

I found that interesting. Of course, this is just one person's interpretation of this word, phrase, and my co-worker's reaction. I'm curious what others from India would say.

My parents visited Foster City for an all too short vacation last month, Jan 18 to Jan 25.

One of the gifts they presented us with was a new copy of Heart Matters, the first book in what is a planned two book autobiography. This volume covers quite a bit from her ancestry, birth, childhood, student days, her start and career at the CBC, then her career as a diplomat in France, then finally her time as Governor General of Canada.

When I picked up this book to read I expected a well presented but unexciting account of her Governor Generalship with some background on her professional career. Well, I was wrong.

Adrienne brought alive the colonial world of Hong Kong and Australia in the early 20th century, the little discussed barbarism of the Japanese in Hong Kong, and the truly amazing voyage that brought her family completely across the world to middle class 1940s and 50s Ottawa.

With deep insight, she discusses what made each of her parents tick, their relationship, and how this affected her and her brother. I learned a lot about her father. She revealed a side of him that he didn't advertise including his thoughts and feelings about WWII in Hong Kong. Her mother was a complex character. You can feel the hardships that she faced, many coming from within, and how Adrienne alternated between loss that she could never be very close to her mother and the negativity that naturally follows from a difficult relationship. I was frankly surprised at her candor and wonder what the reaction of her close family members was. (Apparently her brother is not too happy about some of the details that were revealed.)

Her love affair with France also is a prominent feature of book. She mentions studying at the Sorbonne just after my father studied there. Some interesting insight into the French character and Canada's relationship with France.

The chapters do not exactly follow chronologically. Early on, she describes her visit as an adult to her ancestral village in China. However, in a sense this does fit in chronologically because she is describing her ancestry and background.

Definitely recommended. Looking forward to the next volume.