Fantasia for Piano.(Joyce Hatto)

In the summer of 1989, in Royston, England, a man named William Barrington-Coupe cheerfully received a visitor from Germany: Ernst Lumpe, ahigh-school teacher, fervent music lover, and record collector. For a couple of years, the two men had sustained a correspondence that consisted mainly of Barrington-Coupe, a former classical-music agent and a peripatetic record producer, responding to Lumpe's questions about the authenticity of various arcane LPs.

During the nineteen-fifties and sixties, a number of record companies in England and America had a practice--questionable but nodded and winked at--of repackaging LPs by established artists as the work of fictitious performers and selling the recordings at a deep discount. Barrington-Coupe, known to familiars as Barry, worked at several music labels that helped establish the form--known as the "super-bargain" classical LP. Such recordings, which retailed for roughly a dollar apiece, were a wellspring of artful pseudonyms--Paul Procopolis, Giuseppe Parolini, the Cincinnati Pro Arte Philharmonic, the Munich Greater State Symphony--and Barry is credited with coining the wittiest of all: Wilhelm Havagesse (conducting Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," as rendered by the spurious Zurich Municipal Orchestra). The small labels that Barry worked at had a tendency to run aground financially, but perhaps his most dependable asset was his resilience--a facility for dusting himself off and moving on to the next venture.

Among Lumpe's fifteen thousand LPs, many of which he bought secondhand, were about five hundred of murky provenance. A punctilious collector, he wanted to know the true identities behind the masquerades. He had a particular interest in an Italian pianist, Sergio Fiorentino, and was compiling a discography. Many Fiorentino recordings had been released on Barry's principal label, Concert Artist, and his work had often been appropriated and reissued pseudonymously. Lumpe had turned to Barry for help in separating fact from fiction.

By the time the two men met, Barry was no longer a visible presence on the classical-music scene, nor was his wife, Joyce Hatto, a talented pianist who had achieved modest recognition as a concert performer but hadn't played in public in more than a decade. The only Hatto recording Lumpe owned was a 1970 release of the "Symphonic Variations," by Arnold Bax, a lesser-known twentieth-century British composer whose neo-Romantic works are unusually ornate.

According to Concert Artist's catalogue, the company's founding objective was to provide "a sounding board for young British talent sadly neglected" by the major record companies. But Barry had produced few new recordings since the early seventies. To the extent that Concert Artist remained active, it was mainly as a recycling operation, issuing cassettes and compact disks derived from old recordings, including many from its back catalogue of LPs. Whatever commerce Barry conducted was a cottage industry, the cottage in question being a red brick house on a quiet street in an exurban village an hour north of London. He kept audio-editing equipment in an upstairs room. Downstairs, in the music room, which was furnished with a pair of grand pianos, Hatto gave private lessons; she had also taught at a nearby girls' school.

Barry still possessed a discerning ear and a comprehensive knowledge of classical music, and he responded with gratifying specificity (and candor) to Lumpe's queries. Though recovering from recent heart surgery, Barry was a prodigious talker. Their conversation lasted most of a day. Toward the end, Hatto joined the discussion. A slender, unassuming woman in her early sixties, with dark eyes and dense eyebrows, a fine jawline, and a dimpled smile, she volunteered a few observations about Fiorentino, but she spoke so quickly that Lumpe had trouble understanding her.

At a moment when she wasn't in the room, Barry offered to play an excerpt of a more recent recording of Hatto's: Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. He placed a cassette in a tape deck and they listened to its dizzying cadenza (the longer of two versions that Rachmaninoff wrote). Lumpe expressed admiration, only to be told, "Well, I've fooled you a little. I made a little joke. That's not actually Joyce, it's Andrei Gavrilov"--a former winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Barry smiled. "But now here's Joyce," he said, and he put in another cassette, a different performance of the same cadenza. It was a lighthearted, insignificant jest, Lumpe thought, hardly a test or a ruse.