My rudimentary instrumental talents landed me in the percussion section throughout secondary school and university, so I am accustomed to hearing a full orchestra from the back. As a result, I was perhaps a bit better prepared than my neighbors on Friday evening at Avery Fisher Hall to experience the Mostly Mozart Festival from one of the seats created when the stage was moved forward and chairs were installed in rows behind the musicians. From this “Through the Looking Glass” vantage point, the first violins are on your right and the bells of the horns are pointed directly at your ears. Since the orchestra is seated in an antiphonal arrangement, every sound comes at you in the opposite direction from the familiar – a little like wearing stereo headphones the wrong way around.

The new configuration has certainly sharpened up the acoustics at the Hall, and offered hope for a brighter future. Although thus far only Mostly Mozart is on board, the Philharmonic has expressed an interest in at least experimenting with the stage in the midst of the audience. Panels hanging from the ceiling project the clean and clear sound throughout the auditorium, and the new arrangement even softens the blow of the early-1960s plastic-fantastic look of the place, an ugliness that has a deleterious cumulative effect on the listener’s sense of the quality of the sound.

The seats, described by Lincoln Center as “courtside,” provided an interesting and refreshing view of the proceedings, especially a full-frontal encounter with guest conductor Osmo Vanska, principal of the Minnesota Orchestra. If only the concert had been better, this night would have been one to remember. Unfortunately, Mr. Vanska decided to phone it in.

You’d need to search high and low to find a work of the mature Beethoven that is dull and devoid of melodic invention, but Vanska dusted off the better neglected Namensfeier (Name Day) Overture and offered it in a forced and clunky manner.

Several of the key players of the orchestra were absent this evening as their full-time employer, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, was playing across the plaza for the Mark Morris Dance Group. It is hard to quantify the effect on the ensemble as a whole, but certainly the group was not as crisp as under regular maestro Louis Langree.

The underheralded British pianist Stephen Hough was on hand for a traversal of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major. Mr. Hough is a major talent, whose two recordings of the Brahms concertos with the BBC and Andrew Davis are the best of the contemporary lot. He performed a delicate but noble version of the piece, notable for measured phrasing and evenhandedness. Mr. Vanska, however, was conducting a rather jaunty effort, stylistically the antithesis of Mr. Hough’s thoughtful conception. Although they stayed together rhythmically and metrically, the entire exercise was like listening to two different performances simultaneously. The only section of the Mozart that was provocative was Mr. Hough’s own cadenza, a jarringly modern deconstruction that included some jazz riffs.

Every now and then, some scholar discovers a snippet of music purported to have been written by Bach or Vivaldi and the music world goes wild, as if the public had already absorbed all of the pieces in the Schmieder catalogue. But when Robert Schumann unearthed the “Great” C Major Symphony of Franz Schubert at one of his relative’s houses, this was cause for rejoicing. The work is amazingly inventive melodically and infectious in its brio and unabashed optimism. But it has its detractors and, if any of them were in the audience Friday night, they would have gone home content in their smugness that the work can be long-winded and boring. All it needs is a loutish interpretation like this one.

There were absolutely no subtleties explored in this reading. What we were offered instead was a pedestrian slog that sounded like a first run-through at a rehearsal. No rhythmic variation, no dynamic variety, no colorful touches, just the notes on the printed page. The Scherzo, for example, may be marked “allegro vivace” but it was more of a death march in this plodding version.

For the first time, I noticed how unusually long this symphony is. I had to chuckle when the people directly behind me expressed their disappointment after the Scherzo that there was still another movement to come. At least Mr. Langree will be back for the final week.

There are big doings behind the scenes at Lincoln Center. Now that the Philharmonic has decided to stay, serious discussion of some rather radical changes to the physical layout is under way. From what I hear it may not be your father’s Avery Fisher Hall much longer. At least that’s the view from the back.