I agree that it is hard to speak of a defined original event. As you say, and as anyone else with extensive concert hall experience will attest, the perceived acoustic and tonal balance varies from row to row, and from seat to seat within a given hall. Add to this the fact that microphones usually are installed in places that do not resemble any audience position in the hall, and often are even hung from the ceiling -- there is no 'seat in the sky' to compare what the microphones capture (balcony seating is usually further from the stage and even higher).
The recording that produces for me the best illusion of a live experience over my system is perhaps Wolfgang Rihm's avantgarde work "Jagden & Formen" (Hunts and Forms) for 23 players. While the illusion is not perfect by any means, the timbres and spatial experience remind me very much of the sound that I heard last year from the ensemble Sound Icon playing other avantgarde music in the Paine Hall of Harvard, in Cambridge. Mass., sitting in the fourth row. Yet this may be just a coincidence; who knows how different the sound might have been had I sat somewhere in the hall where the actual recording of the CD took place. There is no way of knowing what the 'original event' sounded like.
I think instead of being about precisely capturing the elusive 'original event' (who sits where the mikes are actually located, including their height?), audio recording and reproduction can only be about believability. Do the tonal balance and timbres, whatever they may be, 'warm' or 'cold', resemble anything that I have experienced in a concert hall? Is the overall coherence of sound signature through all frequencies believable? Are there audible outliers in the frequency spectrum that spoil the illusion of a live event? For example, a certain prominence of high frequencies relative to the other frequencies will be more believable on a 'colder' recording with a brighter midrange than on a 'warm' sounding one with a more present lower midrange -- the converse with receded high frequencies may be true as well. Do the timbral signatures of diverse orchestral groups or soloists match one another to create a coherent illusion within a single perceived acoustic? The latter question of course will come up in the context of multi-miking, apart from the difficulty of matching spatial and ambient clues from all instruments involved (some multi-miked recordings, including the above mentioned one, excel at all that). The better both the recording and the system are, the more the reproduction will sound believable -- even though the sounds may not precisely resemble the 'original event' from any actual seat in the hall where it took place.
"I was there, it sounds precisely like that" -- such an assertion is difficult to make filtered through, as you say, the long lens of memory.
