Joyce Hatto

Joyce Hila Hatto (5 September 1928 – 29 June 2006) was an English concert pianist and piano teacher. Married in 1956 to William Barrington-Coupe, a record producer convicted of fraud in 1966, Hatto became famous very late in life when unauthorised copies of commercial recordings made by other pianists were released under her name, earning her high praise from critics. The fraud did not come to light until a few months after her death.

Joyce Hatto was born in St John's Wood, London. Her father was an antique dealer and piano enthusiast. As a promising young professional, she played at a large number of concerts in London and throughout Britain and Europe, beginning in the 1950s. There were concertos (accompanied by the Boyd Neel, Haydn, and London Symphony Orchestras, and many others), solo recitals at the Wigmore and Queen Elizabeth Halls and elsewhere, as well as concerts by "pupils of Joyce Hatto" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She supplemented her earnings with work as a répétiteur for the London Philharmonic Choir, working under such conductors as Sir Thomas Beecham and Victor de Sabata; and as a piano teacher, both privately and at schools including Crofton Grange, a girls' boarding school in Hertfordshire. She was also active in the recording studios, for several companies such as Saga Records, in England, Germany (Hamburg) and Paris.

Her playing drew mixed notices from the critics. A critic for The Times wrote of an October 1953 performance at Chelsea Town Hall that "Joyce Hatto grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozart's D minor piano concerto and was impeded from conveying significant feelings towards the work, especially in quick figuration." Trevor Harvey wrote of her Saga recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 "one wonders ... whether her technique is really on top of the difficulties of this music ... She shows a musical sense of give and take with the orchestra but it remains a small, rather pallid performance" (The Gramophone, August 1961).

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