I tried to resist the temptation -- I really did.  But somebody (John
Smyth, I think, but I've lost which thread it was on) talked about a
recording of the Saint Saens Symphony No.  3 in which the organ part was
dubbed on three years after the orchestral session, and this particular
bull saw the red rag, after letting fester for a couple of days!

Come on people!  How can this be classed as a real performance, let alone
held up as a luminous one? I know John (or whomever) said he had resisted
the recording for years for this very reason -- but what I want to know
is how can the recording industry justify this sort of thing? Recording
an artistic effort should aim, in my not-so-humble opinion, to preserve
for posterity the performers' attempts to interpret the composer's intent
-- as they see it.  I'm pretty certain Saint-Saens didn't intend for his
concertante work for organ and orchestra to be temporally disjointed in
this way -- that sounds much more like a John Cage work!  This is like
Nureyev coming on to dance twenty minutes before the orchestra tunes up,
or Goya adding the firing squad to another, later, painting, leaving them
out of the 'Tres de Mayo' entirely.

I'm a great advocate of seeing live performance whenever possible.
I recognise it is not always possible or convenient and that so many
of us live in areas where it is difficult to realise such an ambition
-- therefore we rely on recorded renditions for our entertainment and
edification.  But I, for one, would much rather hear the performer's
interpretation than that of the recording engineer.  Stitching together
'takes' so far separated in time (or, indeed, separated at all in time)
strikes me as ...  well, I don't quite know what it is, but I'm pretty
convinced it's not a recording of the piece of music the composer wrote.

Tim Mahon (listening to Reinhold Gliere meeting Bernard Herrmann in the
Adagio of Atterberg's First Symphony)