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Liszt, Fake But Accurate
From Grammophone comes a jaw-dropping story of a husband, his pianist wife ailing from cancer, and a recording scandal that has put the music world to tumult. Here is just a sample:
The advent of compact disc in 1983 meant that the cassettes he was producing of his wife playing were quickly ignored by critics, as magazines such as Gramophone gradually made the transition to the new format. It was not until many years later, Barrington-Coupe writes, that he had the capacity to produce CDs, by which time Hatto was already in the advanced stages of the ovarian cancer which would kill her. He tried to transfer the cassette recordings to disc, but without great success. So the decision was made to re-record her repertoire.Audio editing can do anything, which is precisely why recording engineers for classical labels need to be reminded daily to keep the music honest.Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself. Recording session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem passages.
Until, that is, he remembered the story of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf covering the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the famous EMI recording of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Surely something similar could apply here, he reasoned. He began searching for pianists whose sound and style were similar to that of his wife, and once he had found them he would insert small patches of their recordings to cover his wife’s grunts.
As he grew more adept at the practice, he began to take longer sections to ease the editing process, and discovered, he says, by accident how to digitally stretch the time of the source recordings to disguise the sound. He would, he says, use Hatto’s performances as a blueprint and source recordings which were along the same lines (Laszlo, for instance, shared a teacher with his wife and so, Barington-Coupe says, had the same kind of style and technique).
The performances were hailed as superb in Gramophone and elsewhere…
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