Last year I got a free ticket to see Plácido Domingo at Olympic Park in Sydney. The venue was so large that when the star came on stage he was about as far away as Alpha Centauri. His voice was still great through the massive sound system, but there was about as much atmosphere in the place as at my local 7 Eleven. The experience led me to ponder how the venue for classical music can be almost as important as the music itself.

Our modern-day concert halls are vastly bigger than the spaces for which the music was originally conceived. In 1800 Beethoven hired the Burgtheater in Vienna to premiere his First Symphony. The theatre has been rebuilt over the years, but you can tell from paintings of the time that it had stalls of only 17 rows of 20 seats and four tiers of boxes in a horseshow shape around the sides. The sound of Beethoven’s first symphonic attempt would have filled the space, vibrating even to those in the back row. Fast-forward to modern times, and if you take yourself off to hear the Sydney Symphony play the same piece, you are hearing it in the 2500-seat cavern of the...