Morrison's allusion was almost certainly a reference to something that
has been going on in GRAMOPHONE for most of this year, and it was
assumed by Morrison and his editor that their regular readers had been
keeping up with this and would "get" it. I don't think it was an
unreasonable assumption; your mileage may vary.

In the March 2006 issue (with Villazon on the cover), the critic Jeremy
Nicholas wrote an enraptured piece called "Piano Dreams" about Ms.
Hatto's recorded legacy, with brief mention of her difficult personal
circumstances in the last few decades. Letters in response to that
piece appeared in the next two issues; and in the June 2006 issue
(Shostakovich cover), Mr. Nicholas was moved to follow up with a letter
of his own about the responses he'd received to the Hatto piece -- some
thanking him for giving a neglected great musician some publicity, some
asking him how they could get hold of her discs, others wondering why
GRAMOPHONE had never reviewed her before if she were so great, still
others accusing him of being on the take from Concert Artists, calling
into question that Ms. Hatto was really all that ill, suggesting that
her students did the actual playing on the recordings issued under her
name, etc. Mr. Nicholas challenged the doubters to provide evidence of
the alleged fraud and deception that would "stand up in a court of
law," and continued, "It would help me enormously if you can gain
access to [Hatto's] medical records, provide an accurate log of all
Miss Hatto's visits to hospital over the past 20 years," and so on in
the same apparently irritated vein. He concluded that if her students
were indeed responsible for the playing on her recordings, they should
all be offered recording contracts immediately.

I believe this matter continued to simmer in the wake of Ms. Hatto's
passing and the magazine's obituary for her a few months later. Anyway,
to boil it down to its essence, the GRAMOPHONE -- at least, a few of
its most prominent reviewers -- believes that Ms. Hatto should now be
considered one of the greatest pianists of her time, and that position
has met with a sharply divided response from the readers.

Todd K