On Tuesday, for the second of the festival’s seven Little Night Music programs this summer, the probing British pianist Paul Lewis gave a short, charming spoken introduction to his program of works by Schubert and Brahms, both written when these composers were about 20. I was impressed again by how raptly attentive A Little Night Music audiences always are. Much of this, of course, was because of Mr. Lewis’s superb performance of Schubert’s playful, slightly quirky Sonata in B (D. 575), and of Brahms’s mercurial, restless Four Ballades (Op. 10). But the setting clearly enhanced the listening experience.

Orchestras and opera companies must somehow try to replicate this intimate atmosphere in bigger halls. A few hours before Mr. Lewis’s program on Tuesday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra played a full, rewarding program at David Geffen Hall. The stylish conductor Thierry Fischer, the music director of the Utah Symphony, opened the concert with Haydn’s crackling Symphony No. 59 in A (“Fire”) and ended with a fleet, lean account of Mozart’s darkly intense Symphony No. 40 in G minor. The highlight for me was the performance of Mozart’s majestic Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, with the refined, fresh, young German pianist Martin Helmchen in an impressive Mostly Mozart debut.

The festival temporarily adapts the seating arrangement of Geffen Hall in an attempt to make its 2,730-seat space feel cozier. The stage is extended over the first few rows of seats. This juts the orchestra out into the hall a bit and allows for sections of seating to be set up on the sides and behind the players.

It’s unfair, of course, to compare the up-close experience of hearing Mr. Lewis at the penthouse with hearing the festival orchestra at Geffen Hall, hardly an acoustical marvel. Still, the contrast was striking. Inevitably, a sense of separation, of sound traveling across distance, affects performances in spaces the size of most concert halls. Less imposing halls need to be found for the symphonic repertory. I remain convinced that even newcomers to classical music would be excited to hear, say, the brilliant Cleveland Orchestra play almost anything in an acoustically miraculous place like Carnegie Hall. Still, more orchestra programs should be presented in smaller, alternative spaces.