In the summer of 1989, in Royston, England, a man named William Barrington-Coupe cheerfully received a visitor from Germany: Ernst Lumpe, a high-schoo

Fantasia for Piano | The New Yorker

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2024-10-06 12:30:05

In the summer of 1989, in Royston, England, a man named William Barrington-Coupe cheerfully received a visitor from Germany: Ernst Lumpe, a high-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.