Joyce Hatto's husband has destroyed his wife's reputation and eroded fans' faith in the recording process with his studio subterfuge, writes Michael Dervan

Let's get one thing clear from the start. Joyce Hatto was never as famous in her lifetime as she is now. She doesn't have an entry in any printed reference work of note, but a growing interest in her achievements brought obituaries in major newspapers when she died last June. She would have been hugely gratified to read those obituaries, which saw writers reaching for superlatives to describe her legacy of recordings. The CDs which made her a minor cult celebrity in the world of pianism had only started to appear when she was in her seventies, and the obituarists seem to have taken up her cause in the spirit of righting a wrong.

Hatto gave up public performance in the 1970s (as the result of an unkind review, it is said), and had long suffered from ovarian cancer.

Here was a performer who had been neglected by concert promoters in her lifetime, and who appeared to blossom late in life, producing an apparently endless stream of CDs. More than a hundred were issued in half a decade, across a bewilderingly wide range of repertoire. Hatto even tackled the notorious Godowsky reworkings of Chopin studies, which do things such as run two of the original studies together, or rewrite pieces that are challenging for two hands, and demand as near-impossible mind-and-finger twisters for one. Few pianists dare go near this repertoire; for a little-known player not active on the concert platform to have braved these pieces late in life was extraordinary. Jeremy Nicholas in the Guardian described her as "one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced". Her recordings, wrote the obituarist in the London Times, "traverse the cornerstones of the piano repertoire and document a singular artist of superlative technique and interpretation". It would, truly, have been one of the achievements of this or any other century.

But it was all genuinely too good to be true. It's been demonstrated that numerous recordings issued under her name on the Concert Artists label, including the pieces by Godowsky, featured performances by other players. The recordings borrowed Beethoven piano sonatas from John O'Conor, Sinding's Rustle of Spring from Philip Martin, and major-label concerto recordings from Vladimir Ashkenazy, Jean-Philippe Collard and Yefim Bronfman.

Her husband and record producer, William Barrington-Coupe - whose history includes a spell in jail for evasion of purchase tax in 1966 - initially denied all knowledge of the deception. "She was the sole pianist on those recordings. I was there at all the important sessions, I was the engineer on the jobs and I take full responsibility for everything," he said.

But he later confessed his wrong-doing to Robert von Bahr, whose BIS label had issued the László Simon CD. He now claims he embarked on the fraud "just to keep my wife going and to give her something to live for. She died feeling that it hadn't all been in vain." But he still refuses to identify exactly who is playing on the recordings issued under her name.

It was the digital technology that made the appropriation so simple which was in the end to prove Hatto's undoing. New York financial analyst Brian Ventura is the man who set the ball rolling. He put a Hatto CD of Liszt's Transcendental Études into his computer, and when the iTunes software retrieved the disc information from the Gracenotes database, the artist was identified as László Simon. He alerted the critic Jed Distler, who writes for Gramophone magazine and classicstoday.com, and who had written favourably of Hatto's work.

'GRAMOPHONE' WAS bound to have more than a passing interest in the matter. Its reviewer Bryce Morrison was at the vanguard of the Hatto revival. "Even in the most daunting repertoire," he had written, "her poise in the face of one pianistic storm after another is a source of astonishment. Her warmth, affection, ease and humanity strike you at every turn, her scale and command without a hint of superficial or hard-nosed virtuosity." And the naysayers had also been challenged in Gramophone. The magazine had published a letter to the editor inviting anyone to step forward with evidence that could authenticate the suspicions of the doubters.

Jed Distler, who owned the László Simon recording of the Liszt, compared it with Hatto's, and on the basis of the similarity brought the matter to Gramophone's attention. The magazine, which is part of Michael Heseltine's Haymarket group, commissioned a detailed technical comparison from Pristine Audio, and when the waveforms (accurate on CD to 1/44,000th of a second) were found to match, there was nothing more to doubt.

The Hatto entry in the online Wikipedia encyclopaedia currently identifies 36 pianists whose work, sometimes disguised by digital manipulation, has appeared under her name. BBC Radio 3's CD review programme played Hatto and John O'Conor playing Beethoven side by side - literally, one on the left channel, the other on the right - and demonstrated them to be identical.

One recording is definitelygenuine. Hatto recorded Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations with the Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra under Vernon Handley, conductor laureate of the Ulster Orchestra, for another Barrington-Coupe label, Revolution. The LP was issued in 1970, and Handley has gone on record about the experience, both before and after the eruption of the current scandal. Last month Handley told the Boston Globe: "She was a very nice person and with 10 good fingers. Very, very musical. But when I knew her, it was a narrow repertoire. When we did a Mozart concerto, she played beautifully, but in the middle of the last movement, she just lost her way.

"The Bax recording was very, very difficult indeed. She couldn't really play rhythmatically. And although she enjoyed the Bax, it was very, very hard to put together . . . One of the hardest records of my 179 discs. It seems such a great shame that anything like this should surround her, because she was a lovely, lovely person. And there was no doubt there was a great musical talent in those fingers but she never made a reputation in Great Britain."

George Hurst, principal conductor of the RTÉ NSO from 1990-91, recorded with her in 1959, and remembers her as "a charming lady" when they worked on Rachmaninov's Second Concerto. The recent burgeoning of her reputation had come to him as a complete surprise.

So what does it all mean? Hatto's reputation, obviously, is in tatters. The amazing encounters of her official biography - youthful collaborations with great conductors (including Victor de Sabata and Sir Thomas Beecham), consultations with great pianists (Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Cortot and Clara Haskil among them) - will have to be set aside until hard evidence is produced.

It's hard now to believe in things like Barrington-Coupe's private recording studio in Cambridge, or Hatto's use of a Steinway that Rachmaninov liked to play - the pianos on her claimed recordings sound nothing like Rachmaninov's own instrument, which Mikhail Pletnev has recorded on. Whatever the best achievements of her performing career actually were, they are likely to be dwarfed by the scale of the deception of her recordings. And until her husband comes clean, she's unlikely to get serious credit for any of the playing that may actually be hers.

Barrington-Coupe claims she didn't know. I've listened to an extended interview for New Zealand Radio that Hatto did with clarinettist Murray Khouri in 2005. She responds freely to questions about her approach in the recordings. She says she liked to record without edits, and she sounds like someone with remarkable recall of things long past and a well-informed interest in the minutiae of piano playing. She does not sound like someone who would fail to recognise her own playing.

Surprisingly, she doesn't sound at all under the weather. Yet she was indeed ill. Music journalist and biographer Jessica Duchen has established that she suffered from advanced inoperable ovarian cancer, but for 14 years rather than the usually quoted 30. 'Hattogate', as the scandal has been dubbed, produces layer after layer of conflicting information, wherever you look.

Barrington-Coupe claims to have found his inspiration from a famous recorded deceit, when the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad consented to record Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in 1952 only if another singer would provide some high notes that she could no longer manage. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was the colleague who obliged.

IN THE 1950s and 1960s, Barrington-Coupe had been involved with the Saga label, which issued a range of recordings under fake names. The label even sold legitimately owned recordings by a range of pianists as being by an invented player, Paul Procopolis, because the sales were likely to be higher that way.

The invention of the tape recorder, and the editing it facilitated, changed the face of classical recording. Back in 1969 the producers of Georg Solti's Rosenkavalier recording regaled readers of Gramophone with that set's use of 100 tapes and over 800 splices which took a total of 2,000 man hours to get right. I've since been told of an opera recording compiled from a short run of performances that involves over 5,000 edits - digital techniques have both simplified and improved the process enormously.

Recordings billed as taken from "live" or "concert" performances routinely include corrections made at patching sessions. Vladimir Horowitz's famous 1965 return to Carnegie Hall was touched up for its original release, and only issued "live and unedited" in 2003. I've spoken to a composer who told me of a recording made of one of his string quartets. The musicians couldn't play the piece accurately before the sessions, couldn't play it accurately during the sessions, and couldn't play it accurately after the sessions. And yet a recording of them playing it perfectly was issued on CD.

The record industry likes to brush over the fact that recordings are often closer to the world of Hollywood special effects than that of actual concert performances. The Joyce Hatto affair, which can be expected to rumble on for some time yet, is probably the most extreme recording deception yet. It puts Milli Vanilli's loss of a Grammy Award for not having performed on their own debut CD in the shade.

The best that might come out of the fiasco is a re-appraisal of lesser-known performers whose work has been borrowed, and a greater public wariness about recordings in general. It's not always safe to believe in what you're listening to.

Now hear this 'Hattogate' revealed

A wealth of information about checks that have been made on Hatto recordings can be found at pristineaudio.com and on charm.rhul.ac.uk, the website of the British Arts and Humanities Research Council's Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music.

Andrys Basten's website has been tracking the story in detail, and her comprehensive page of links is at www.andrys.com/hatto.html.

Pianists whose work has been identified on Hatto CDs include: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Tor Espen Aspaas, Sergei Babayan, Josef Banowetz, Miguel Baselga, Giovanni Bellucci, Yefim Bronfman, John Browning, Jean-Philippe Collard, François-Renée Duchable, Alexander Guindin, Carlo Grante, Horacio Gutiérrez, Ingrid Haebler, Marc-André Hamelin, Endre Hegedus, Jean-François Heisser, Ian Hobson, Eugen Indjic, Leonid Kuzmin, Oleg Marshev, Philip Martin Yuki Matsuzawa, Roger Muraro, Minoru Nojima, John O'Conor, Patricia Pagny, Chen Pi-hsien, Pascal Rogé, Konstantin Scherbakov, László Simon, Balázs Szokolay, Izumi Tateno, François-Joël Thiollier, Dubravka Tomsic