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- Ron Prather was born on 29 November 1948 in Anderson, South Carolina, USA. He was an actor, known for Venom (2018), The Accountant (2016) and Surface (2005). He died on 26 March 2022 in Royston, Georgia, USA.
- 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. - William Halford Barrington-Coupe (born 1931 in Wales, died 19 October 2014 in Royston, England) was a Welsh record producer and music impresario.
Married in 1956 to concert pianist Joyce Hatto, he was jailed for a year in 1966 for "blatant and impertinent frauds". He attained further notoriety in 2007 when he confessed that a large number of piano CDs that he had sold on his Concert Artist/Fidelio Recordings label were not in fact performed by his wife but were copies, in some cases digitally manipulated, of commercially available recordings by other pianists.
In the early 1950s Barrington-Coupe worked in London as a classical musicians' agent. A directory from 1953-1954 showed him with two exclusive artists on his books. A 1955 article in Billboard magazine refers to Barrington-Coupe, as President of Concert Artists, licensing Mozart recordings by the "London Mozart Ensemble".
The Saga Films and Records Company, of which he was an employee, collapsed in 1960, with the Official Receiver declaring that Barrington-Coupe was chiefly responsible for the company's demise.
Following the Saga collapse in late 1960, he created the Lyrique record label with Marcel Rodd, who had a record-pressing factory, and began to release records by artists under different pseudonyms, a not uncommon practice of the era. "The repertoire was from the variety of master tapes now in Rodd's tape library," wrote Ted Perry, one of Barrington-Coupe's former colleagues in an unpublished autobiography. "It was also, possibly, from some of Coupe's own tapes since he always seemed to have a lot of recorded material of unknown, not to say dubious, provenance."
Recordings of classical works issued on his Delta label were believed to have been copied from radio broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain, mixed to disguise the sources. Private Eye has claimed that on one recording of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, he made the mistake of inserting a number of bars backwards.
A recording issued featuring the Danzig Philharmonic was in stereo, when it was known that that orchestra had ceased to exist a decade or more before stereo recording was common. He also made up artists' names: "Wilhelm Havagesse" was the falsely-named conductor of the "Zurich Municipal Orchestra" in a recording of Scheherazade released on Barrington-Coupe's Fidelio label in 1962 (ATL 4006).
Charles Haynes, who worked with Barrington-Coupe at Delta, recounted that "quite often they used to 'monkey around', hence conductors Havagesse and Homer Lott and the soprano Herda Wobbel", lamenting that the practice stopped when "the Trades Descriptions Act threatened the continuing existence of these fine artists: 'End of the Road for Musician Havagesse' proclaimed the Daily Telegraph's headline."
Barrington-Coupe set up a further label, on 25 February 1960, with Major Wilfred Alonzo Banks's financial backing: Triumph Records. This time his collaborator was Joe Meek, a record producer who became best known for "Telstar", the 1962 hit by the Tornados. The two men later fell out and Meek left the company, which subsequently went into liquidation. Meek was followed by David Gooch, who produced a number of extended-play and long-playing records on a new label, Dial Records. This association was terminated when Barrington-Coupe had obvious financial difficulties. Desperate to make ends meet, he began importing radios from Hong Kong, which he sold in London markets and by mail order, but became the subject of legal action when he failed to pay purchase tax.
On 17 May 1966, after what was then the longest-running and most expensive trial at the Old Bailey, costing the British taxpayer £150,000, Barrington-Coupe and four other defendants were found guilty of failing to pay £84,000 in purchase tax (over £1 million in 2007 currency). Barrington-Coupe was fined £3,600 and jailed for 12 months. His company, W.H. Barrington-Coupe Ltd, was fined £4,000 and finally wound up in 1971. Summing up, Judge Alan King-Hamilton said: "These were blatant and impertinent frauds, carried out in my opinion rather clumsily. But such was your conceit that you thought yourself smart enough to get away with it."
After he was released from prison, Barrington-Coupe was reunited with Hatto. While she began to earn a modest reputation for her recitals of Liszt and Chopin, Barrington-Coupe maintained a lower profile. In the 1970s, the couple disappeared from the public eye, becoming virtual recluses in their detached modern home in Royston, Hertfordshire.
It was not until 2002 that they were heard of again. During the previous 13 years they had apparently recorded another 103 CDs of Hatto's playing, which Barrington-Coupe began issuing on his Concert Artist label. In 2007, these CDs were found to be fraudulent copies of recordings of other artists issued by other labels. Barrington-Coupe initially denied any wrongdoing but subsequently admitted the fraud in a letter to Robert von Bahr, the head of the Swedish BIS record label that had originally issued some of the recordings plagiarised by Concert Artist.
Bahr immediately shared the contents of the letter with Gramophone magazine, telling journalist Jessica Duchen afterwards that he "had given a lot of thought" to suing Barrington-Coupe for damages, but was inclined not to do so, on the assumption that the hoax recordings were "a desperate attempt to build a shrine to a dying wife".
A biopic called Loving Miss Hatto 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. - Helen Bailey was born on 22 August 1964 in Ponteland, Northumberland, England, UK. She was married to John Sinfield. She died in April 2016 in Royston, Hertfordshire, England, UK.