First of all, Yes... All modern CDs are MEGA LOUD due to the loudness war, but I'm glad that most audience recordings are NOT like this.
But aside from that, I've never understood why people rely on normalizing to make their recordings louder — because all it takes is one stray peak to screw up the entire normalizing measurements.
Just to make a simple example, let's say that somebody clapped really loud and it was recorded at -1 dB RMS, but the music only peaks around -6 dB RMS on average. So you go to normalize, and it finds that -1 dB peak and therefore only amplifies your recording by 1 dB. Really not a very "intelligent" measurement there.
That's just a really generic example, but most music has unimportant peaks that will inevitably limit the amount you can increase the volume with simple normalization.
My solution has always been to use the hard limiting feature Adobe Audition (or Cool Edit Pro). I basically find the loudest song in the performance, and see how much I can boost it without significantly compromising the dynamic range. There's a bit of an art to this, but it's not very difficult if you know what you're doing. Anyway, once I find this number I apply this amount of boost to the entire recording. And believe me, the results are ALWAYS better than what I would get with normalizing!
This is basically what they did to albums in the early '90s, before they started getting crazy with the volume. Most of those recordings were louder than stuff from the '80s, but they sounded great.
There are other good limiters out there, like Waves L3 (which will work as a plug-in with most editing programs). I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with.