A tasty little tale is currently developing in the music world that was exposed by the Gracenote’s database that backs iTunes. The story revolves around the recordings of the late pianist Joyce Hatto. Before her death in 2006, Hatto released a collection of pieces from major composers. It sounds innocuous enough. People release recordings of Beethoven and Mozart all the time.
The controversy here emerged last week when a critic at Gramophone got his mitts on one of the Hatto recordings. When he put one of the discs in his computer iTunes identified the recording as completely different album. After trying other discs from the collection, he found that many of them were identified as other albums.
This compelled the critic to call in a team of musical experts to begin pouring through the tracks, analyzing them strictly. They’re not done with the task, but he said, “it seems clear that at least some of these great performances are identical to other performances available from other recording companies.”
iTunes clues rock classical music world [News.com]