I’m sure you’ve all been following the story of pianist Joyce Hatto and the mysterious recordings that have surfaced recently, yes? No?

Well. What HAVE you been doing?

The basic story is this: “A talented, conscientious pianist who had enjoyed an active if undistinguished career in Britain falls ill and retreats to a small town. Here in the last years of her life she launches a project to record virtually the entire standard repertoire for the piano. Her recordings, CDs made in her late sixties and seventies, are staggering, showing a masterful technique, a preternatural ability to adapt to different styles, and a depth of musical insight hardly seen elsewhere.” Then she dies, leaving behind what would have been the most comprehensive catalog of recordings ever, pretty much.

Except, of course, it wasn’t really Joyce Hatto in the recordings.

You’re wondering how I know all of this, aren’t you? Because Wade is a big geek and likes classical music and reads Gramophone, the magazine that broke the story earlier this month. “Responding to a tip from a reader, a critic with the British Gramophone magazine, Jeremy Distler, slid Joyce Hatto’s CD of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes into his computer. His iTunes library, linked to a catalogue of about four million CDs, immediately identified it as a recording by the Hungarian virtuoso Laszlo Simon.”

God bless iTunes.

Now, of course, Hatto’s husband has confessed to faking the recordings, which has lead to other questions about why he did it and what Hatto herself might have known about what he was doing. The husband, of course, claims that he did it for her.

Why am I telling you all this? Because this morning, when I read about Hatto’s husband coming clean, I e-mailed Wade at work, and he sent me the link to another piece about why the husband might have done it. And I told him that if anything happened to me, he should feel free to fake entries on this web site.

You’re all kind of looking forward to that now, aren’t you?