Al, I respectfully disagree. Your comments have little meaning in audio science. Your evaluation was sighted and you self graded your listening skills, making the above statement invalid. The fact that you may have even read the program highly biased your opinion of what you heard. Furthermore, what you think you heard was far removed from what was originally in Mahler's head as he imagined the composition. The mere act of translating his thoughts to two dimensional music notes on paper was a major corruption of the original idea with massive loss of information. Then, many years later, those notes were interpreted by the conductor, and again by the musicians during that particular performance further altering Mahler's original intent. Finally, the instruments' sounds that you heard were inexorably changed by that particular hall and the specific seat in which you were located.
What you heard was far removed from an exact copy of Mahler's original intent. The whole process was highly flawed from the moment he put pen to paper, the original recording process. That others seemed to agree with your subjective impressions by giving a standing ovation simply shows a massive subjective opinion, a shared personal preference, if you will, unverifiable, uncontrolled, and unrepeatable.
Oh, and one more thing: "spectacular" is a rather vague audio term. Could you perhaps use a more precise term with specific meaning in audio science? And please do not describe the sound as being "natural".
On the other hand, you could simple have enjoyed the experience, and been fully emotionally engaged being completely aware that what you heard was only an imperfect translation and interpretation of Mahler's original intent. And that seems to have been good enough.
Insert a string of emojis here.
(Just in case there's any confusion!)
