The fact that we don't have original recordings of classical music has
always bothered me. Sheet music somehow lacks the "touch" of the
composer. A complete and mastered recording is something unique and
stuck in time, capturing the individual players, instruments, sound and
everything else. Listening to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" (1973)
evokes a particular feeling that, at least to me, cannot be replicated
by someone playing it. It bothers me that the full output of the
artist's mind couldn't be captured and somehow stopped in a single
perfect execution, summing up the emotions that the composer wanted to
express in a single frame. It's sad that I won't ever get to listen to
a studio version of Tchaikovsky's "Piano Concerto No. 1" of the time it
was composed, supervised by Tchaikovsky himself. It's like pretending a
guitar cover video of your favorite guitar solo it's the same as
listening to the original song. It isn't, no matter how good the
covering player is. A copy cannot be superior to the original, even if
it adds or changes something according to the player's mind, it's still
a copy. Even the original composer playing his own song live does not
and cannot express the same emotions as a recorded version of the song.
This is obviously my own opinion (and a very unpopular one) on a
necessarily subjective thing.