Another year, another set of anniversaries

But how best to mark them, if at all?   

There's nothing the music industry likes more than a big anniversary. 84 years ago the centenary of Schubert's death sparked a series of recordings and a competition to "finish" his Unfinished Symphony. The year before had seen a rush of Beethoven recordings to mark 100 years since his passing.

Yet by modern standards these efforts would probably seem a little feeble. And there's more these days for marketeers to get excited about - we can now add a raft of recorded conductors and musicians to composers; witness last year's Beecham 50th anniversary. What classical music magazine editor could resist such an easy target to fill an issue?

Any minute now you're probably going to expect me to announce our Delius and Debussy collections, both of whom are 150 years old this year - in the former case it's happening on Sunday, 29th January, and I'm sure the broadcasters won't miss an opportunity to slip in a quick "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring" or similar to mark the day.

Naturally, and with a finger firmly on the pulse of the musical anniversary brigade, we've taken this opportunity to celebrate one of the great British composers of the 20th century, by releasing an album of music by someone other than Delius - Arnold Bax. Ahem.

I'm not sure whether Bax and Delius ever actually met, though it's entirely possible their paths may have crossed to the extent of being at the same concert at the same time. Bax's great friend, composer E. J. Moeran, did once set off on what was supposed to be a 'pilgrimage' to Delius's house in Grez, France, together with a group of friends led by Philip Heseltine, AKA Peter Warlock. Unfortunately Moeran, cryptically referred to in Eric Fenby's book as "Old Raspberry", got waylaid, probably in a bar somewhere in Paris, and never quite got to his destination to pay his respects.

So the concrete and direct links are perhaps a little tenuous. I could of course pretend we're getting one in early on the 50th anniversary Bax celebrations next year. And guess what? We're a year late for the 200th birthday of Liszt with our Bernstein recording of A Faust Symphony. But maybe we could pretend to be celebrating the 55th anniversary of the work's première, even though it took place in September and not January?

Anyway, returning to Bax for a moment, I'm happy to claim the 90th anniversary of the Viola Sonata (1922), though we've just missed the same anniversary for Mater ora Filium (1921), and the 80th anniversary of the Nonet slipped by in 2010.

All a lot of fun, and it seems a musical anniversary of one kind or another is always just around the corner. And on a more personal note, the end of January is always the run up to our own anniversary - though I don't rate the 7th birthday of Pristine Classical on 1st February as particularly noteworthy, other than for the fact we're still here!

This time in 2005 I was busy getting as many recordings (12, to be precise) ready as possible for our launch, and wondering how best to sell the 48 Bach Preludes and Fugues. For the record, it was the thought of setting up 96 downloads, one for each prelude and fugue, for a business which had no real precedent nor great hope of flourishing, that led me to decide to go with album downloads only, rather than following the "songs" route of Apple's iTunes, at the time one of few if any competitors.

But we do have another, very interesting anniversary on the immediate horizon. On 14th February (always a memorable date of course) it will be exactly five years since I took a call from James Inverne, the then-editor of Gramophone, to ask me if I'd ever heard anything by a pianist called Joyce Hatto - might I be available to do a quick bit of technical investigation for them on the matter?

It's hard to believe that five years have passed since that particularly memorable day - and the weeks of press interviews, TV and radio coverage and so forth which followed.

In retrospect this turned out to have been perhaps the perfect crime. Very few people got especially upset. Nobody at all got upset enough to do anything about it legally. The perpetrators (I use the plural deliberately here, though the main villain was of course William Barrington-Coupe, Hatto's widower) got off scot free. A small handful of reviewers got taken down a peg or two by a small handful of their critics. But crucially, all the loot stayed in the hands of the crooks.

I've recently read Robert Harris's excellent 1986 account of the infamous "Hitler Diaries" hoax, written three years after the main event itself - by which time two men were doing time in prison, and the German Stern magazine was around ten million Deutsche Marks poorer than it had been at the start of the fiasco.

Despite any number of major differences between the two cases, there are also some clear and very obvious parallels. Both were the brainchild of an experienced and entirely likeable and convincing con man, both of whom carried on with their compulsions to lie and invent stories long after the revelation of their duplicity. Both may have started this particular hoax (of several) for fun but then quickly got caught up in the momentum of something which, for primarily financial reasons but also because stopping would effectively unmask the fraudsters, could not be stopped.

But crucial to both fakers was the presence of victims who sincerely and wholeheartedly wanted to believe in them and their products. In Stern journalist and Nazi memorabilia-hunter Gerd Heidemann, the Hitler Diaries had a very powerful and enthusiastic advocate - backed by an equally greedy but paranoid senior management at Stern, for whom the more they spent on "Diary" volumes, the more they believed in them - and the more they guarded them lest anyone else relieve of them of their expected scoop, which is largely why the volumes themselves were never properly tested before publication, yet within days were easily and conclusively revealed as fakes.

Likewise Joyce Hatto - as all those fawning newspapers and magazine obituaries demonstrated, there were a number of experts who really, truly and deeply wanted to believe that an ageing, cancer-ridden former concert pianist could record some of the finest piano CDs ever heard - in her garden shed - and could so brilliantly reproduce the greatest concertos with an unknown orchestra and conductor in a series of non-existent or dubious locations in Cambridgeshire, without anyone actually having seen her play a piano since a rather sorry retirement concert in the mid-1970s.

As I've already suggested, I suspect the late Hatto's husband, William Barrington-Coupe - still at large though no longer producing or selling fakes CDs supposedly by his wife - may well have ultimately been carried along by the burgeoning success of his little enterprise. Nobody's ever carried out or published a full and proper investigation into the matter. Nobody knows how many CDs were produced and sold. It seems it's been more fun for online commentators to produce websites unmasking the real artists than for anyone to set out to convict a sweet, loveable, old lying fraudster.

In one or two cases the artists he ripped off may have profited mildlyfrom the affair. I know for a fact that Barrington-Coupe has - receiving a substantial fee from an independent TV production company for "consultation" work in the preparation of a TV drama on the subject which has yet to see the light of day.

Some might think that a little bizarre - akin to asking the Big Bad Wolf about the whereabouts of Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood following their mysterious disappearance, and believing he'll actually tell you the truth whilst completely denying both his stomach-ache and sudden weight gain, but there you go. In the absence of any real investigation or detective work, why not ask the lying crook at the centre of the affair to spin you a yarn? He's clearly a convincing story-teller, after all...

If you think my descriptions of Barrington-Coupe a little harsh, think again for a moment. Around 120 CDs were supposedly produced - with many more planned (an almost inexhaustible supply, of course). Each one ripped off the work of another pianist, deliberately digitally distorting their performances in order to make them sound more "brilliant", before misrepresenting their work and talent under the name of another. Many Hatto releases pulled the same trick on orchestras and conductors too. Hundreds of musicians, indeed, have been abused in this way.

Think then about the money swindled from everyone who bought a "Hatto" CD - say "B-C" had sold 100 copies of each at £10 a time; he'd have netted £120,000, plus postage - at the time he was operating the scam this was heading towards being worth a quarter of a million US Dollars. Not a bad little earner, to add to reviews garnered from the other dubious products his label was then putting out. Yet, as far as I know, he's still stringing people on with lies about Hatto appearing on the CDs, as if everyone will start to believe him if he says it often enough - the classic behaviour of a fraudster as witnessed in the aftermath of the Hitler Diaries. And I don't see any great recall of discs or refunds either - it's truly been the perfect crime, in so many ways.

Anyway, let's leave "Barry" in his comfortable nest and move on for one final anniversary: I've been extolling the virtues of the Amazon Kindle to my father for a good while now. It seems he's about to crack and buy one. It's the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens this year, and he wants to re-read some of the novels. A number of them are rather hefty - but their Kindle editions not only cost next to nothing, they weigh likewise. Another anniversary marketing triumph all round!

Oh, just finally... Since beginning this column I did decide to slip in a little Delius to celebrate his birthday - you'll find him in our free 128k MP3 album download under the capable baton of Felix Slatkin.

 

Andrew Rose
27 January 2012  

 
P.S. I'm heading off to the mountains for a little ski-ing this weekend and will be out of contact for a few days. Business at Pristine will carry on as usual in my absence.