When you live in Smalltown Anywhere, the notion of a bunch of people showing up, just a short drive down the road, ready and willing to play live classical music for you … well, that’s exciting. Not to be missed.

So we gladly made the 20-minute drive to a not-quite-as-small French town, and paid 20 euros each to enter the church there, where a regionally based orchestra was playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with choir and soloists — an ambitious undertaking that was the musical equivalent of a suicide mission.

After a dreary Puccini requiem, deservedly obscure but blessedly short, we were a bit … shall we say, “concerned” … over the virtuosity of the orchestra in front of us. Even before they launched into one of the most celebrated works in the classical music canon before a crowd of several hundred.

And, oddly, we found ourselves looking at the coming 80-90 minutes with a sort of morbid fascination akin to watching a slow-motion train crash. How bad could it be? Let’s find out!

We can make excuses for the performers.

–Clearly, this is not meant to be a top-of-the-heap orchestra. You shed those pretensions when you jam 40-some musicians and another 40 singers into the altar area of a church in a town of 7,000. Not only could you hardly swing a dead cat without knocking over a candle, any vigorous bowing by the strings presented the risk of skewering a neighbor.

–The orchestra has ties to a regional university, and when you hear “students” in an orchestra you adjust your expectations accordingly. Most of them seemed older than “students”, but still.

–I am not sure everyone got paid. We must assume the soloists did, but if the others were working for free or for fun … you judge the whole of the operation in a different way.

–And, of all things, the orchestra played Beethoven’s Ninth, which even casual music fans know from start to finish, and this or that blunder will be obvious to most of them. (Had they played some modern experimental/atonal piece, they could have blatted and scratched their way through a vale of blessed, if vaguely angry, audience ignorance.)

Beethoven’s Ninth is known for technical difficulty. The link includes a sentence noting the symphony’s “incomprehensible scale” and “nearly impossible technical demands” — and this orchestra just did not need that burden.

From the opening chords of the first movement, there was trouble. Musicians were tentative and entrances often were so timid as to be nearly unnoticeable. The strings were particularly shaky and their limited numbers (eight violins, perhaps) made for a shallow and thin sound.

Dynamics were an issue. Areas where listeners expect staccato crispness were a muddled mess. Almost as if 1) some of the musicians were afraid of making mistakes and 2) others had not been brought up to speed on the conductor’s stylistic preferences — which left too many passages in a netherworld of indecision.

The second movement, the molto vivace, is meant to be bold and crisp, and in some ways it was the biggest disappointment because it never was what even middle-brow classical fans have come to expect.

Too, there were moments of unmistakable “mission fail” — the transition that the French horn incorrectly fingered before going silent for a few dreadful seconds; the trumpet who hit a wrong note in another familiar passage.

The third movement brought home tuning issues as well as individual reticence throughout a piece of music that often leaves key phrases to single musicians — who so often produced unplanned dissonance that the planned dissonance also sounded wrong.

The renown final movement, the Ode to Joy, shifted our wincing focus to blunders in amplitude.

The four soloists were routinely drowned out by orchestra or choir or both. The tenor seemed particularly agitated that his unamplified voice was, he knew, nearly impossible to hear over the volume generated by the musicians and singers just behind him. And the four-way interplay, among soloists, was mostly missed in the cacophony.

It seemed clear the orchestra and choir and soloists had rarely (if ever) rehearsed together. Especially when the soloists, who had their backs to the conductor, kept shooting over-the-shoulder glances at him to see where they were being taken.

It was fascinating, and endlessly interesting. We discovered, perhaps to our horror, that if we cannot have a top-drawer performance we really do not mind one that is struggling for simple survival.

When it spluttered to an end, we felt a bit like parents of kids on the youth soccer team who have just been crushed by opposition they should never have had to take on.

Rather than “bravo!” we felt like shouting, “Nice try! … Things will get better! … Thanks for playing! … It was way better than staying home!”

To be sure, there were bright spots. The woodwinds, collectively, were a life raft throughout, offering near-complete competence and sometimes lyricism. The first oboe was particularly strong. So were the clarinets and flutes.

But the strings were all over the place, and the cellos were a specific problem, which came as a surprise, because doesn’t everyone want to play the cello? The French horns presented issues throughout, a major failing because they are so important to just about any symphonic work.

What can this orchestra do? Practice! More practice! More rehearsal, both on a collective and individual basis. (And, next time, send someone to the middle of the performance hall to see how the sound is mixing.)

Failing that, this group should adjust their goals. Don’t take on the world’s most famous symphony in small numbers at a difficult venue. Try a piece with a few recognizable passages that does not overwhelm the capacities of the musicians.

I should make clear that we enjoyed it. Really. Live classical music is always a treat and part of it is seeing/hearing how well these people in real time, in front of you, handle the assignment.

Who knew that listening to an orchestra overmatched by the work it is attempting to play … offers a different sort of fascination to the listener?

If the orchestra comes back, we will see them again. And hope for the best.