I go along with what the audience (well, one who is engaged and listening, or perhaps even not) might receive.
So, like above, it's really a means of communicating ideas.
Maybe I'm a bit bizarre, but I don't ever "let the music wash over me" and all that aesthetic pleasure: I want to hear ideas, and execution.
For that reason, I don't really listen to music very much, at least not passively: I'm looking for ideas or their expression. More or less, things I can steal and use for my own ends, whether in music or a different field of enquiry.
As for what a performance "is": that's a legitimate question, but the response is likely to be technical and not exactly pertinent to the spirit of the question.