Fono Forum - An Offside Universalist

The following is a translation of an article that originally appeared in the June 2004 edition of Fono Forum magazine. To See the original German article, for which you will need Adobe Acrobat, please click here

An Offside Universalist

The British label Concert Artist, now distributed also in Germany, holds a lot of surprises for the friends of piano music. Among these must count the many recordings of pianist Joyce Hatto.

"Joyce who??" With this reaction most of even the most passionate piano connoisseurs would answer the question for the British pianist Joyce Hatto.

Even though the artist masters an almost frighteningly large repertoire, superior not only to that of more famous pianists of the likes of Myra Hess, Clara Haskil, Moura Lympany or Martha Argerich, but also to that of almost all her male colleagues, Joyce Hatto's career has developed more offside the international music business. The over seventy CD's offered by the small label Concert Artist give a fascinating view into the many-sidedness of the artist: choice works of Bach, including the "Goldberg Variations", around 60 sonatas of Scarlatti, the complete sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, the complete works for piano solo of Chopin and much Liszt and Schumann.

The piano concertos of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and Gershwin. Plus various pieces from the Russian and French virtuoso instrumental music of the 19th century. The care of the recordings, the continuously high pianistic and stylistic level of the artist lets one hardly suspect that the greater part of the recordings was made during the relatively short period of about ten years during the 90ties when Joyce Hatto was already in her seventh decade.

The pianist, born in 1928 in London, who is active in the recording studio till this day, studied with the Busoni pupil Serge Krisch, later in Warsaw with Zbigniew Drzewiecki and in London with Ilona Kabos, the great Hungarian pianist and pedagogue. Her teachers in composition have been Mátyás Seiber and Paul Hindemith, and she worked with Nadia Boulanger and communicated with Alfred Cortot about technical problems in Chopin interpretation. After the war she worked with conductors like Victor de Sabata, Thomas Beecham, Paul Kletzki or Jean Martinon and later championed the composer Arnold Bax, recording his gigantic "Symphonic Variations" for piano and orchestra as well as some piano sonatas.

At a time when it was not considered good form to play Franz Liszt, Joyce Hatto presented in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1974 a programme devoted exclusively to the Hungarian composer. “No other composer has suffered to such an extent from so- called interpreters as Liszt” says Hatto in an interview in 1973. Her recording of Liszt's Paganini Studies for instance demonstrates impressively how much genuine music lies in these pieces. Every keyboard macho will mercilessly play over the minute weaving of lines and the shimmering palette of colours which Hatto brings to these works. However, if one misses a little bit the demonic, one is granted instead conceptually balanced Liszt performances which are devoid of any showing-off. From her teacher Serge Krisch, Hatto says to have gained an understanding for style and sound. Indeed her recordings show a balance of sound and a competence of style.

Wonderfully light and lilting she opens the cosmos of the Goldberg Variations, creating a marvelous balance between creative fantasy and the severeness of composition. It may be left open whether her fine and unpretentious Beethoven interpretations, occasionally sounding too passive, are on a par with Schnabel, Brendel, Gulda or Annie Fischer. Joyce Hatto's playing of Chopin and Rachmaninoff instead belongs to the interpretive top class: she forms the Chopin Waltzes completely out of the powerful dance-like impulse of the rotational movement, always elegant, but never over-refined, giving the pieces a personal note with daring but never tasteless rubati. In her hands, both collections of the Studies Op.10 and 25 are turned into poetic excursions, presented with big pianistic aplomb. Rachmaninoff, with whose music Joyce Hatto is familiar since her youth, is rendered with a darkish seriousness without any sensational eruptions, beautiful in tone and played with severity. So softly flooding, relaxed and far from any hysteria that one may have never have heard the Russian composer's 3rd piano concerto, and Hatto also possesses the necessary power to play out the dramatic developments in the first movement with bursting ecstasy. The piano art of Joyce Hatto stands in contrast to today's ostentatious music business to which her playing without vainness means a corrective. She makes music without imposed superlatives so to say, and she convinces just by doing so. The listener, who opens up for her "silent" virtuosity, will be rewarded with endurable experiences.

Fono Forum Magazine