[Thor Joachim Haga]

Yes, I shouldn’t have used the word ‘preferred’ there. That was misleading, as it implies careful scrutiny and comparisons between different performances to land on the “preferred” one. That’s not what happens in my case. I’m either indifferent to, or oblivious to, most alternative versions. If what I have is fine and fulfills my needs, that’s enough. Regardless of what else is out there, better or worse.

But there are of course exceptions where even I think about various performance matters, especially if the original version has severe issues of some kind. For example, if someone re-recorded Horner’s BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS in sparkling new sound, with flawless orchestral performance (but kept the original programme), I would probably opt for that. It’s the performance difference version of the sound issue/RAIN MAN version I mentioned earlier. But it would have to be rather extreme cases like that.