AMONG THE several claims to fame of a Canadian pianist who will play the National Concert Hall next week is that she is a grand-daughter of one John L Todd, a man who became her country's first "professor of parasitology", writes FRANK MCNALLY
Which lends a certain aptness to another of Janina Fialkowska’s biographical footnotes. Namely that she was one of the victims of what may be classical music’s greatest ever hoax. I refer of course to the Joyce Hatto scandal, wherein an obscure English pianist experienced what seemed to be a miraculous artistic renaissance late in life: making at least 100 virtuoso recordings of a bewildering range of composers, despite not having performed in concert for 30 years.
After Hatto died in 2006, it emerged that the genius behind this late flowering was her husband, a record producer named William Barrington Coupe. “Barry”, as he was known in the industry, had taken older recordings by accomplished but (usually) little-known artists, sometimes digitally manipulating them, before presenting them as his wife’s work. The CDs were then published on his Concert Artists record label, which specialised in rescuing neglected artists.
Hatto’s belated fame spread virally on specialist internet sites, where critics and connoisseurs exchanged discoveries and opinions. Although by then in her 70s and suffering from cancer, Hatto appears to have been in on the scam, and together with her husband bolstered the fan-mail, while defusing any scepticism, with occasional, skilful interventions in the debates along the lines of: “I don’t normally communicate with critics, but . . .”
It was only after Hatto’s death that the musical detectives went properly to work: running her recordings through computer databases that identified their timing and wave-forms as identical to named others. The list of the plagiarised would eventually include Ireland’s far-from-obscure Beethoven master, John O’Conor.
But even months after the exposé, when many originals had been traced, some pieces were still eluding the posse. The New Yorker wrote that unless the chief conspirator made a full confession, it could “take years” to trace all the provenances: “For instance, no one has yet identified the pianist in the glorious recording of [Liszt’s] Mephisto Waltz – assuming (the default assumption) that it wasn’t Hatto.” The default assumption was correct. The real musician behind the “glorious” piece was Fialkowska, who thus came out of the affair well. Those not looking quite so good included a critic who, years before, had criticised another of the plagiarised musicians for sounding “oddly un-moved by Rachmaninov’s intensely slavonic idiom” and for lacking “crispness and definition”.
Unfortunately, on hearing the exact same piece attributed to Hatto, he thought it “stunning [. . .] truly great [. . .] among the finest on record [. . .] with a special sense of its Slavic melancholy”.
Perhaps John L Todd would argue that, with the long-term publicity the hoax created for those whose music had been ripped off, the original parasitism may have evolved into symbiosis. After all, Barry’s claim was that he only did it as a sort of revenge-tribute to his ailing wife, herself (he thought) unfairly neglected. In any case, having her music lifted is not the worst thing that has happened to Janina Fialkowska.
Seven years ago, she developed a rare, large, and very aggressive tumour in her left arm. Radiation successfully shrunk the cancer and saved her life. But for a time it looked like her musical career would be collateral damage. The treatment also necessitated severing a nerve and removing part of her muscle: doctors did not expect her to play ambidextrously again.
She was not so pessimistic: persevering with protracted, painful physiotherapy, while in the meantime keeping her (right) hand in by transcribing some left-hand piano concertos for it so that she could still perform. Then, in an unusual operation, surgeons transplanted a muscle from her back into the left arm and within months she was playing concerts again with all her former style.
Her Irish debut next week will feature pieces by Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra accompanying. But as well as being a debut, the concert marks a return of sorts.
Her maternal grandfather, the aforementioned professor, was himself the grandson of an Irishman, also John Todd, who left Omagh in 1816 for New York. Life there was hard, however, and when the British consul offered grants for distressed Irishmen to settle in a remote part of Canada “habited by Indians and wild beasts”, Todd took the chance.
A generation later, his similarly adventurous son headed west to a gold rush town, where he opened a store, speculated in mines, and got rich. John L was his son, born on the side of a road in 1876, when the expectant mother went into labour while out for a buggy ride. Three quarters of a century later, with grim circularity, John L also would die on the side of a road, when his car hit a tree on the way back from a fishing trip.
In between, the family wanderlust would take him to Africa where, as a brilliant young doctor, he established the link between the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness before going back to Canada to make academic history. His daughter Bridget Todd married a Polish officer called Jerzy Fialkowski. So when their daughter Janina plays in Dublin she will – as Philip King would say – be bringing it all back home; or some of it anyway.
Janina Fialkowska performs with the RTÉ NSO in the National Concert Hall on December 3rd.