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@mrdecibel 

What I find the engineers, producers and the artists do right, and this requires a very fine ear, is the ability to take each individual track (studio recordings specifically) and synchronize it all, resembling each performer playing live, together, in sync....

Ah, but that’s the complete opposite of what Mercury did for the Living Presence series!

When you have a full orchestra of say 100 players, it is impossible to individually place a microphone for each player.  Mercury took the opposite approach and just used three microphones in a line, for left, centre and right.  These were mixed down for stereo records and later for CDs by adding the centre signal to both left and right channels.  Much later, their SACD releases contained all three original channels but as DSD rather than PCM.  (When I play the SACDs, my preprocessor adds the centre channel to left and right because I chose not to use a centre speaker)

Once Mercury had the microphones set up and the recording equipment (either tape or film) set for maximum volume, they did no further mixing or synchronisation.  The conductor and orchestra did the rest, with a contribution from the venue!

So the recording is an unadulterated version of a real performance from a listening point just back and slightly above the conductor.  Regular concert goers quickly learn what a real unadulterated orchestra sounds like in a real acoustic.  The recording engineers for Mercury, and these days for 2L, don’t interfere in any way with the artistry of the performance, once they have the equipment working properly!

I very nearly attended a Mercury original performance in 1962, when to quote Mercury’s notes, "Antal Dorati ... electrified a capacity audience at London’s Royal Festival Hall with a stunning performance of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle." which was sung in Hungarian.  I still remember the soprano Olga Szonyi cutting through the entire orchestra towards the agonising end.  Mercury shortly afterwards hired the Watford Town Hall for a recorded re-run, using 35-mm film as the sound medium.

This performance has just been re-released (again) in March 2025 ...

@lanx0003 

The criticisms I’ve heard of the Mercury sound in general are that it is ’dry’, it lacks a lot of warmth from the venue!  That probably stems from the relatively close positioning of the microphones in relation to the conductor?

I have heard that a well-known British label is known to increase ambience by playing the original recording in a church, and adding reverberations back in.

Getting back to your recording, Gilbert Kaplan was a successful businessman, and got himself taught to conduct just to play this one symphony of Mahler’s.  He was pretty darned good at it too, toured the world as an amateur and gave over 100 performances.  He then learned the adagio from #5, doubling his repertoire.  

I have CDs of his performance with the London Symphony Orchestra, which definitely does not use a small orchestra!

I remember hearing a stunning performance in the Melbourne Concert Hall.  (Melbourne and Sydney have intense rivalries, including Concert Halls!  Whereas Sydney’s has a world famous exterior but a bare-bones interior, Melbourne’s has no real exterior, being sunk into a huge hole by the Yarra River, but a sumptuous inside).  There was a standing ovation, and the guy next to me turned and said he "wished his stereo sounded like that".  I had just been thinking "this sounds exactly like my system".

Mahler 2 was the main work played after the $100-m refit of the Sydney Concert Hall, mainly done to fix the acoustics.  Much of the refit is sculpted wood paneling to break up reflections!  It worked ....

@mrdecibel 

"Multi Track" recordings are what I was referring to, as I listen to and have been involved with multi track recording (studio stuff)

No worries!  I will point out that 2L in Norway do something similar to Mercury's approach for their stunning multi-track recordings, although they typically move the orchestra into a rough circle around their microphone tree.  They often record in large churches, but that is to keep any wall reflections distant, not for the reverberation.

I would be very interested in any light you can throw on how multi-microphone recordings are mixed, especially with digital techniques.  For example, are PCM signals combined as raw PCM, or is there some intermediate higher resolution format?

@lanx0003 

Thank you for sharing your wonderful experience at Hamer Hall in Sydney. It will definitely be one of the destinations on our list in the hopefully near future

I had to look up Hamer Hall!  It is the new name for the Melbourne Concert Hall and seats just under 2,500 people.  I was lucky enough to go to the opening concert season, which was Saint Saens opera Sampson and Delila.  At the time I was working in Tasmania and commuting from Melbourne, which had a pretty stuffy reputation, compared with racy Sydney.  I had no idea the performance was controversial until the Act 3 Bacchanale when most of the cast stripped naked and slowly formed a giant human pyramid.  And this was the grand opening of Melbourne's new concert venue, built to rival the Sydney Opera House.

My favourite performance is from Copenhagen.and controversially had two directors, one from Israel and one from Palestine.  They also swapped the storyline so the Palestinians were persecuted by the Israelis.  This would be my most powerful argument against streaming - I have the physical silver disc but I cannot find the performance anywhere else.

The Sydney Opera House has two major performing venues, one for concerts and one for opera.  They were also swapped over early in construction, and the bigger became the Concert Hall which has just had a major refurbishment.  The smaller space is a bit small for opera, so in summer we have the Handa Opera performing on a temporary stage floating on Sydney Harbour with views of the actual Opera House.  Sits twice as many people so commercially viable.  Lots of DVDs have been made of these Handa productions ... Handa season is about six weeks so try and time your visit!

@lanx0003 

Oops, I said my favourite performance of Samson and Delila is from Copenhagen, but it is actually from Antwerp.  Not even the same country ... and it can still be found on the web!