Fascination with the Orient has enriched the musical palette of Western composers to an extent Mozart hardly could have contemplated when he spiced a few of his own compositions with supposed “Turkish”elements. Far from letting Oriental qualities infuse his essential compositional style, as many later composers would do, Mozart applied Turkish touches discretely and, one suspects, humorously. Who can listen to the choruses of janissaries in “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” with their augmented intervals and noisy percussion, without cracking a smile?

As Mostly Mozart audiences learned over the weekend, “Abduction” had a forerunner in the unfinished singspiel “Zaide,” which is also a seraglio opera. The performances of “Zaide” gave rise to an enjoyable exploration of the Turkish musical phenomenon by the early music ensemble Concerto Köln and the Turkish music ensemble Sarband. Saturday night, in one of Mostly Mozart’s popular late night concerts dubbed “A Little Night Music,” the focus was on the waltz. And in a reversal of the usual line of inquiry, the program explored how Western currents influenced Turkish music.

The program began with a prototype of the Western art-music waltz by the Viennese composer Joseph Lanner. Presumably, it earned a place on the program by virtue of its title, “The Ottomans,” but if it contained outright allusions to Turkish style, they escaped me. After a stormy introduction with Schubertian triplets, the piece settled into an engaging chain of waltzes played with an appealing lilt if not flawless intonation by a quintet of string players from Concerto Köln.

Enjoyable as it was, the Lanner didn’t really have much to do with the thesis of the concert, since Hamaizade Ismail Dede Efendi — the Turkish composer put forth as having been influenced by the Western waltz — died in 1808, 31 years before the Lanner was written. Instead, it was Beethoven’s German Dance No. 12 and Coda and Mozart’s Six German Dances, K. 571 (four of which were played), which supplied the context for Dede Efendi’s innovations. Just how the German Dance morphed into the waltz is a subject for another time, for these hearty, rather earthy pieces, in triple meter to be sure, are far removed from the waltz of Lanner.

But the Beethoven, performed by Concerto Köln, with colorful support from Sarband, emerged as a fine piece in martial style with trumpets and drums, in which trumpeter Hannes Rux excelled in the rousing coda. The Western ensemble also gave polished performances of three of the Mozart dances. And Sarband joined the group in one with salient Turkish elements — the piquantly chromatic No. 6.

As for Dede Efendi, the waltz cropped up in five engaging songs by him. Ably supported by Sarband’s five-man ensemble of Turkish instruments, Mustafa Dogan Dikman sang them in a small, rather nasal and distinctly non-operatic voice.Yet he put across the pieces effectively. The songs, made up of verses with refrains, had simple melodies of a frankly populist cut, but they were pleasant, and you went home humming the tune of “Once Again a Young Rose,” which Dikman repeated as an encore.

Until August 26 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).