There have been some odd comments in this thread today - one can't hear instrumental timbre from the back of the hall??? No localization??? You should be able to hear where an instrument is located on the stage from any seat in the hall. Many composers rely very much on the audience's ability to localize sound, on and off the stage, most obviously Henry Brant and other composers of "spatial" music. This is what many audiophiles mean by "imaging", the ability to pinpoint the location of an instrument. And granting we are trained to blend our sounds together as much as possible, you should be able to distinguish different instrumental timbres from each other!!
And yes, there is an equivalent of what audiophiles call soundstaging in any hall - the sound of a great concert hall is very specifically designed by acousticians (with greatly varying levels of success, of course), and the recreation of this in a recording is an important part of "soundstaging." The best recordings do give you a sense of what the specific hall they were recorded in sounds like, though of course it can never be the same as hearing it live. Carnegie Hall presents a very different "soundstage" to Avery Fisher, for example (and a far better one, too), and this has a HUGE effect on what the music sounds like. If an orchestra goes on tour and plays in several different halls over the course of a few weeks, sometimes very big adjustments must be made to account for the different sound, or "soundstage" if you will, of each hall. Another example of how the "soundstage" can change in the same hall is if the orchestra changes their set-up, as they often do. Placing sections on different levels of risers or keeping everyone on the floor makes a very big difference to the sound out in the hall. Or moving a shell backwards or forwards so that there is more or less room on the stage (thus making the distance between players change). Or having movable side panels. All of these things will greatly affect the "soundstage" that is presented to the audience in the hall, and many modern halls are designed with many such features, so that the hall can sound different from week to week.
And for a trained musician, it is indeed possible to pick out an individual member of a violin section, even from the last row, though certainly most concertgoers would not be able to do this. It is easier to pick out individual players of the brass or woodwind sections, especially if you attend concerts by the same orchestra on a regular basis. And speaking of seating location, I hope, Mr. Tennis, that your favored last row is not under an overhang of any kind. If it is, this might indeed interfere with your ability to perceive the music as the performers are intending, for various acoustical reasons, and I would suggest that you change your seat if this is the case.
I did not mean to suggest that soundstaging and imaging are more important than accurate realization of instrumental timbre, of course, just that as Sns originally posted, these things do matter in the attempt to reproduce live music as much as can be done via recording. Goodnight, and enjoy the music!
