Brave old world, that has so much unheard music in it. Not exactly the words of Shakespeare’s Miranda, I know, but that’s how I feel having experienced great things in the concert hall for the first time recently: Tippett’s Second Symphony from Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra last night, and earlier in the week more self-styled “musical toys” from overnight sensation as Newcomer of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine 2013 Awards Mei Yi Foo: a gallimaufry of piano miniatures by Bartók, Benjamin, Fujikura, Lachenmann and Unsuk Chin.

We had, as presenter James Naughtie so wryly remarked, set aside our mourning weeds for the low-key glamour of celebrating a far from moribund classical recording industry. Movers, shakers and humble BBC Music Magazine contributors all shifted from the airy dining space at the ever-accommodating Kings Place yesterday - I won't forget the mint marshmallow - and descended to woody Hall One for the magazine's 2013 awards.

The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert - a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier - took a while to draw attention from the farthest reaches of this unfriendly recital space.

You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.

Had we but world enough and time... A new book by the editor of the Guardian makes it clear quite how many hours in the day it takes to run a national newspaper in the digital age. There is the unyielding nature of 24-hour news, while the internet relentlessly asks grave questions of print media’s business model. Some editors respond to the job's demands by keeping obsessively fit, and then there is Rusbridger’s alternative guide to stress-busting: the piano.

It was the kind of programme that great pianist Vladimir Horowitz used to pioneer, with the simple balm of Scarlatti offset by Scriabin’s flights of fancy, and a dash of virtuoso fireworks to conclude. Though he is an admirer of the master, and even featured Horowitz’s hyperintensification of an already extravagant Liszt transcription in this recital, Yevgeny Sudbin is very much his own man: a thinker verging on the visionary who always seems to know exactly where the more extreme fantasists among his chosen composers are heading.

Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be optimistic about the effective, colourful scores of 32-year-old Anna Clyne; we know that Benjamin Grosvenor, her junior by 12 years, is already a pianist of mercurial assurance, a real front-runner.

Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with them. The Hatto goose was cooked when the Gracenote music database used by iTunes detected that one of her albums was not her work at all.

A couple of  novels based on Hatto-like events have already appeared, but for this TV treatment, writer Victoria Wood stuck to the couple's real-life story, though she had clearly allowed herself plenty of creative width in the process. Joyce Hatto died in 2006, and while her husband William Barrington-Coupe (or Barrie as he was known) is still alive, he has never been terribly forthcoming with the actualité.

As presented here, Barrie was always a wide boy and a con man, though only in the nicest possible way. However nice that is. Wood's story was a classical game of two halves, the first part, set in the 1950s, telling the story of a talented but shy young musician who barely dared to dream of achieving any kind of success, and the classical musician's agent who vowed to make her an international star. All she had to do was play the piano, and he'd take care of all the rest.

Wood's deft writing was splendidly served by the cast. Rory Kinnear played the young Barrie with a perfect balance of cheeky charm, ambition and dodginess, while Maimie McCoy's fledgling Hatto was almost heartbreakingly naive, sincere and trusting (Kinnear and McCoy, pictured above). Her first meeting with Barrie, when he was bowled over by her as she was working as a rehearsal pianist for an orchestra, established her self-effacing character - "I'm just a rehearsal pianist, not needed on voyage," she muttered bashfully.

The fact that she was also unfeasibly glamorous wasn't lost on Barrie, though her obliviousness to such earthy concerns was drolly illustrated in their wedding night scene. While Barrie was eagerly waiting for her to slip into something more see-through ("let the dog see the rabbit," as he put it, to her bafflement), Joyce's attention wandered to the nearby piano, and she'd soon forgotten about her new husband altogether. "Oh lord!" she exclaimed, as he came back to find her. "Negligée... wedding night... I'm sorry!"

The 1950s milieu was evoked with painful authenticity, from the drab church halls where Joyce played to local music societies to the humdrum home life of the Hatto family, perhaps with Andy Stewart celebrating Hogmanay on the primitive TV (pictured left). Joyce's mother was played with shrewish impatience by Phoebe Nicholls, and her daughter was too eager to escape to heed her all-too-accurate warnings about Barrie's questionable credentials. But, try as Barrie might to launch his wife as a new classical sensation, eventually they had to face the fact that she somehow lacked the right stuff. 

Then Wood fast-forwarded us to Royston, Hertfordshire in 2002, where Joyce had morphed into Francesca Annis and Alfred Molina was playing the older Barrie. Decades of disillusion had taken their toll - "living with a disappointed person is hard, it drains the flipping life out of you," as Barrie put it - and Joyce had grown cranky and resentful. Since she was also suffering from cancer, it was difficult to blame her, though the drastic change from her sweet and ingenuous younger self was poignant to behold.

Under the circumstances, Barrie's scheme to invent a fictitious Hatto who had suddenly become a reclusive recording phenomenon in her late years, although unscrupulous and illegal, was quite inspired. Wood evidently also enjoyed the idea that this odd little couple could pull the wool over the eyes of august classical critics from the Gramophone and Radio 3, who hailed the brilliant artistry of the long-lost Hatto (the critic who hailed a Hatto performance but slagged off the same recording by its true performer was, perhaps mercifully, omitted). Eventually, it was largely through the efforts of Gramophone editor James Inverne that the fakery scam was exposed.

Barrington-Coupe has always maintained that his wife was innocent of the fraud, and here it was left ambiguous, with Hatto seeming slightly detached from reality and not really grasping what was going on. Whatever the reality, it made a strangely touching slice of drama.

Homeland reviewed overleaf