Before a large audience and a small one
I used to be part of my high school choir and I did a lot of singing, I was a base singer.
Sometimes I would perform in front of an audience of my peers and they would always be chill when the audience was small and when there were people they knew in the audience. I didn't understand this. I would much rather perform in front of a sea of faces I don't recognize than a few people I do. When the audience is small, the pressure is more intense because it feels more personal, and when the audience is a big one it feels more anonymous and less pressure.
When there is a small audience, you can imagine all the people in the audience together. With a large audience, you can keep your eyes somewhere above the audience and you can perform more comfortably. With a small audience, looking above their heads would look obvious like you're tensed or don't respect them enough to look at them. But if you look at specific people in the audience, it gets very awkward when you make eye contact with someone, and you don't want to single someone out, because then everyone in the audience will think you are looking at them.
I have experience with audience size because they kind of added the performance to my final year scores so I had no choice than to keep showing up and performing. I'll be fair that it felt good after we were done. It feels like you did something cooler than the average student did. When I say audience size, it's roughly 2000 students gathering. But there's less tension than doing the same thing in a class of 38 people.
Regardless of the audience sizes, I always got nervous when I had a family member or a friend, especially if I knew they were inside the big audience. To do well with confidence at that point I considered it as being lucky. I did notice that over time I got slightly used to it, not totally but I learned to control the hand shaking and the sweating on my nose.
Original source of the image from Pixabay but edited by me