William Barrington-Coupe
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William H. Barrington-Coupe (also known as William H. B. Coupe)[1][2](1931 -) is a record producer and proprietor of Concert Artist/Fidelio Recordings, a British classical music record label. Barrington-Coupe's wife was Joyce Hatto, a concert pianist and recording artist whom he married in 1956.
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.[3]
The Saga Films and Records Company, which he co-founded with Marcel Rodd[4], collapsed in 1960, with the Official Receiver declaring that he was chiefly responsible for the company's demise. [5]
Following the Saga collapse, he created the Lyrique record label with Rodd, who had a record-pressing factory, and began to release records by artists under different pseudonyms. "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variety of master tapes now in Rodd's tape library," wrote Ted Perry, one of Barrington-Coupe's former colleagues in an unpublished autobiography.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."[1]
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 claims that on one recording of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, he made the mistake of inserting a number of bars backwards[5]. 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: according to Private Eye, one conductor was identified as Wilhelm Havagess.
Despite his lack of business acumen, Barrington-Coupe went on to set up a further label, Triumph Records, this time with Joe Meek, a record producer who became best known for Telstar, the 1962 hit by The Tornados. The pair later fell out and Meek left the company, which subsequently went into liquidation. Desperate to make ends meet, Barrington-Coupe began importing radios from Hong Kong, which he sold in London markets and by mail order, but fell foul of the law when he failed to pay purchase tax.
On May 17 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."[1]
After he was released from jail, 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 Cambridge.
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 Artists 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 plagiarized by Concert Artists.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c 'Revenge of the fraudster pianist', Daily Mail 24 February 2007
- ^ Hatto's birth, marriage and death certificates
- ^ Fifield, Christopher (2005). Ibbs and Tillett: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire. Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 301. ISBN 1840142901.
- ^ 2000, "What's happening", Playback, The Bulletin of the National Sound Archive 23 (Spring 2000): 2
- ^ a b 'Music and Musicians', Private Eye No. 1180, 16-29 March 2007
