A current Newsweek article relates some details of the late career of "The greatest pianist almost noone ever heard of," Joyce Hatto. She was a fairly good, but not exceptional, pianist and received mediocre reviews during a brief early concert carerr, and then retired to private teaching. Near the end of her life, a series of "mastered" CDs were released under private label that received phenomenal reviews. A total of 119 CD releases appeared, to rave reviews.

A chance discovery, when someone with an iTunes account plugged one of her CDs in, led to a forensic analysis that revealed that apparently all of the Joyce Hatto CD performances were simply copied from the performances of other great pianists.

To oversimplify how iTunes indicated the fraud, early recordings had no identifying information tacked onto the recordings, so iTunes (Gracenote) uses the "duration of the piece" to identify individual performances from a library, and identified a piece on the Joyce Hatto CD:

When New York financial analyst Brian Ventura loaded Hatto's version of Liszt's Etudes into his computer, the online Gracenote database recognized it as Hungarian Laszlo Simon's 1987 recording of the same piece, based on the fact that both recordings were exactly the same length—down to one seventy-fifth of a second.

The current Newsweek article, June 25, 2007 issue, is at Grand Theft Piano for those who'd like more info.

A "related article" that appeared in an earlier issue, gives some of the Tech: How the Hatto Hoax Was Revealed

This earlier article was also posted here previously at:

I Read It In The Newspaper (individual post).

So if you're gonna steal someone else's performance for your own CD, leave the last three seconds off the piece – or add a fart at the end – I guess.

John