Man apologizes for fake piano recordings

The husband of the late British pianist Joyce Hatto, who passed off recordings by other artists as those of his wife, says he would do the same thing again but would not release the recordings to the public, according to a newspaper interview.

William Barrington-Coupe told the Sunday Times newspaper that he regretted stealing other performers' work, but had done so because his wife found it difficult to play due to pain from the cancer that eventually killed her.

"Joyce's life was hell," he was quoted as saying. "She was in such pain, and it was so humiliating for her for such a long time."

"Yes, I would do it again," he said of the fraudulent recordings, which he said he produced without his wife's knowledge. "Because it made Joyce so happy. But this time I wouldn't publish the CDs."

A modestly successful concert pianist who stopped performing in public in the 1970s, Hatto died last year at age 77 and was hailed in obituaries as a neglected genius based on more than a hundred CDs produced by her husband on his Concert Artists label.

That reputation collapsed last month after Gramophone, a British music magazine, reported that at least one Hatto CD recording, Franz Liszt's "Transcendental Etudes," was a BIS release by pianist Laszlo Simon.

Barrington-Coupe, 76, acknowledged he had stolen recordings of other artists and passed them off as his late wife's work.

"It wasn't something I liked doing," he told the Sunday Times. "But Joyce's music was everything to her _ and to me, too."

Barrington-Coupe said his wife was suffering from advanced ovarian cancer by the time he had the capacity to produce CDs, and her grunts of pain had marred recording sessions. Barrington-Coupe said he searched for pianists of a similar sound and style to patch over his wife's recordings.

Over time, he took bigger and bigger pieces of other recordings, and learned how to manipulate speed to disguise the source.

"Technically I was proud of what I did, although I'm not proud of anything else," the Sunday Times quoted him saying.

Barrington-Coupe said the deception grew easier over time.

"It's the old thing. If you've killed someone once it's easy to do it the second time, so in the end you kill ceaselessly," he said.