Biography

Joyce Hilda 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 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).

Vernon Handley, who conducted the Guildford Philharmonic on Hatto's 1970 recording of Sir Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations for her husband's Revolution label, said that "[a]s a solo pianist, she was absolutely marvellous. She had ten wonderful fingers and she could get round anything and also she was an extraordinarily charming person to work with, even if she could be very difficult."

In another interview, after the 2007 hoax perpetrated by her husband had been revealed, he added that "[s]he had a very doubtful sense of rhythm ... [t]he recording of the Bax was a tremendous labour." Still the record received a favourable review: "Joyce Hatto gives a highly commendable account of the demanding piano part," wrote Robert Layton (Gramophone, February 1971).

In 1973, Hatto gave the world premiere of two recently published Bourrées by Frédéric Chopin in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. However, in 1976 she stopped performing in public and moved to Royston, Hertfordshire. It was later claimed that she already had had cancer at that time. However, the consultant radiologist who saw her every six weeks for the last eight years of her life stated that she was first treated for ovarian cancer in 1992, fourteen years before her death and had had no previous history of the disease.

A biopic called Loving Miss Hatto (2012) was screened on BBC television on 23 December 2012. The screenplay is by Victoria Wood and the film was made by Left Bank Pictures and filmed in Ireland. Joyce Hatto was portrayed by Maimie McCoy and Francesca Annis. Rory Kinnear and Alfred Molina played her husband.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous