Chamber of Secrets was recorded without John Williams and it is arguably the best performance of all three HP soundtracks. And it is arguably the least original. Apples and oranges. I thought we were talking about composer not being present at the recording sessions and how that affects the final recording. Not writing, but recording/orchestra performance. How is that not related? Karol Yes this is rather a performance issue rather than of originality of the writing or its quality. The fact that CoS is not as original as HPPS or HPPOA isn't tied to the performance. Naturally it would have been different if JW had been conducting it himself but I wager that it would have not been drastically different. Chamber of Secrets was a scenario, where Williams had to rush a lot of material for the film when his schedule for Catch Me If You Can was pressing on him. Still he apparently wrote new material up to the last minute (of the recording sessions) but the score does have a strong sense of adaption of older materials. But in the case of DoS Shore has been able to focus on writing exlusively for the film full-time, which makes a whole lot of difference. You can think about it this way: Relinquishing some of the control over the minutiae of the scoring process into the hands of other professionals will both save time for Peter Jackson to supervise the recording sessions at Wellington, while he runs the whole post production circus and for Howard Shore who can focus purely on delivering the best possible music with his staff in New York and delivering it to the capable hands of Conrad Pope and NZSO, who will perform and record it. Pope is an experienced conductor, orchestrator and all around master of film scoring process, so he is able to make the needed adjustments to the music on the podium, omitting bars where needed, changing a solo trumpet to an oboe etc. to conform the score to the picture and to the director's needs. Sure Shore seems to leave some of these decisions to other people but what he gains is free time to work on writing the new cues, doing major changes to older ones, implementing entire rewrites etc. I don't see this (if any of the above speculation hits close to the mark) as a bad thing, rather a newly structured way to create this music and this doesn't differ so much from the norm of modern day film scoring.