A couple weeks ago, the Nashville Symphony began what executive director Alan Valentine called “a new tradition” for the orchestra—an annual summer music festival. This first festival was an all-Beethoven event—three concerts on three successive Saturday evenings, June 15, 22 and 29. Each concert centered on a major symphony—the Third, the Fourth and the Fifth—and featured one or more soloists. Whether this tradition will endure remains to be seen. But the inaugural event brings into focus some questions about our symphony that are worth a look.

The cardinal one concerns the orchestra’s proposed state-of-the-art performance hall, to be situated on Fourth Avenue South near the Country Music Hall of Fame. This project “has legs,” Valentine says, and is expected to be ready in 2006.

Does the orchestra need a new performance hall? Its customary venue is Jackson Hall at TPAC, and it almost never fills that hall more than two-thirds full. This remains true even after a much touted performance in New York’s Carnegie Hall that drew favorable reviews from New York critics. And it also remains true that, most of the time, this orchestra sounds OK at best, and sometimes not even that. Is a new hall a sound investment for the city and for private sponsors, especially when the projected hall is for the symphony’s use alone?

The answer seems to be, “Yes—maybe.” On the one hand, the orchestra cannot consistently perform well without better space to rehearse and perform in. On the other hand, having such space will not guarantee a better orchestra. Other factors are important as well. Even if a new hall is built, the owners may have to find something else to fill it with. Because a hall alone does not an orchestra make, and even an excellent orchestra may not draw the listeners it needs.

It is a real dilemma—and the only way to resolve it is to build a good hall. Alan Valentine acknowledges that the orchestra often has problems, in intonation, in togetherness, in balance. These are problems that can be fixed, he says—but only if the musicians can hear one another: “If you can’t hear it, you can’t fix it.” And in Jackson Hall the musicians can’t hear it. I can testify to that from personal experience: Half a dozen years ago, I sang several concerts there with the orchestra as a member of the Nashville Symphony Chorus. I could barely hear the singers to my immediate left and right; the total sound was mostly murk, in the midst of which a conductor was waving his arms.

Usually, the musicians cope pretty well, watching the conductor for rhythmic pulse and guessing at dynamic level, and the result is passable. But not always. During the last season, two performances included segments that were debacles. The first was a concert featuring guest soprano Kathleen Battle presenting a song cycle in which Toni Morrison’s words were married to André Previn’s music. That marriage, celebrated by the great soprano’s superb voice, should have been thrilling. But the solo voice was overwhelmed by the orchestra. Obviously discomfited, Battle finished the evening by singing several unaccompanied encores—traditional spirituals for which she is famous. Only then could her voice be heard.

In a later concert, the Statewide Children’s Chorus joined the orchestra to perform, for the first time in public, a work that the symphony itself had especially commissioned. The score, by Bruce Saylor, promised a rare and delightful experience. An audacious and effective suite of texts selected from two quite dissimilar poets—Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—had been given a sophisticated yet singable setting for young voices. Some 150 middle- and high-schoolers had spent nearly a year learning this subtle and elegant music. But nobody knows how well they sang it. Like Kathleen Battle, they were drowned in a muddy orchestral flood. Parents and grandparents and siblings and teachers felt obliged to stand and vigorously applaud, pretending this was something the singers should be proud of.

The recent inaugural festival concert demonstrated that such debacles don’t have to happen. The venue was not Jackson Hall, but War Memorial Auditorium. WMA is not an ideal venue, by any means, but it is acoustically better than Jackson Hall. And that was dramatically evident in the opening concert, when guest soprano Kelley Nassief sang with the orchestra a Beethoven concert aria. In this performance, neither soloist nor orchestra was unforgettable, but both could be heard—and in a proper balance.

More tellingly, several times during the three concerts, WMA’s responsive space was filled with uniquely thrilling, unmediated acoustical sound—rich, focused, resonant, absolutely in tune. This didn’t happen often, but when it did, it took the breath away. The sound was acoustic, but not merely acoustic: It was also tactile and visceral.

An emblem of this sound is an orchestra’s string section. Orchestral strings have no frets, and so the players must have acute ears. Even on accurately tuned fiddles, intonation is treacherous, as any beginning Suzuki class will show. And symphonic string sections are likewise minefields. One instrument a microtone out of tune kills a true unison. And if several instruments microtonally disagree, the result sounds like a camera out of focus. This is the sound nearly every ensemble produces. Most people on the planet have never heard a dozen string players perfectly in tune, and to tune a whole orchestra is enormously more difficult. But some orchestras do it as a matter of course. The Concertgebouw of Amsterdam does it. The Vienna Philharmonic does it. And every once in a while, the Nashville Symphony does it.

They did it when they opened the second festival concert with Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. This music, composed in 1810 for a play by Goethe about a heroic freedom fighter, opens with a grave iteration of the same chord, filling the house with proud, vibrant resonance. For some ears, that sound is classical music. Its uniqueness demands the right kind of space.

But such a space makes its own demands: A good hall will only make bad players sound worse, thus good players are essential. Getting them is a big problem; keeping them is a bigger one. The problem is money, and it remains, though salaries here have never been better. It was only shortly before the trip to Carnegie Hall that the orchestra could hire enough string players to balance the brasses and winds. According to Valentine, salaries are now high enough to attract young players who before wouldn’t bother to audition. But retention remains a problem, especially (but not only) among string players.

Consequently, ours is mostly an inexperienced orchestra. There exists a core of experienced musicians who’ve been here for a decade or more, and who choose to stay because they can afford to, by picking up extra work as session players or as teachers. Most young players, though, see Nashville as a farm team. For its part, the orchestra hired some of them because they were the best available at the time. These players, however talented, have not played much of the repertory: They may have heard Beethoven’s Fifth, but most will have played it for the first time in this festival.

Good leadership is essential too. What is true of young players is true also of young conductors—including the ensemble’s assistant conductor, Byung-Hyun Rhee. Talent is important, but it is no substitute for experience—or, for that matter, practice. During the regular season, the orchestra has four two-hour rehearsals plus a dress rehearsal to prepare three full-scale major works for each subscription concert. That is by no means too much time. For this summer festival, the orchestra had only two rehearsals plus a dress. Asked about this, Byung said, “Well, you have to let some things slide.”

He was not expected to conduct the festival; he was thrown into the breach when Kenneth Schermerhorn had to submit to surgery. The music director is expected to recover fully in about six weeks and to be on the podium again this fall and for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the young associate conductor got a chance to show his mettle.

Under his direction, the festival had some memorable moments. One very pleasant surprise was the Fourth Symphony, more rarely heard than the Third or the Fifth, and very different from either—lucid and witty, not turbulent and willful. That wit is more common in Beethoven than is generally thought, and in the Nashville Symphony’s hands, it was delightful at times. Still, the orchestra’s performance was very uneven. There were flaws in “tightness”—in pitch and in rhythm—and recurring dissents about tempos. Particularly disappointing was the “Emperor” piano concerto on the second Saturday, featuring Awadagin Pratt as soloist. Pratt, an accomplished pianist, has appeared several times in Nashville. But on this occasion, his marriage with the orchestra was never consummated, perhaps for lack of sufficient foreplay.

Even so, the festival was well received by those who heard it. Would the ensemble have been better with Schermerhorn on the podium? Probably not. Like a good hall, a good conductor is essential. But neither alone will a good orchestra make. That, for me, points toward the essential need. In principle, it is very simple: The players need to play really together and really in tune all the time. If they do that, they can pretty much play anything they want, and I’ll want to hear it. They could select from the whole gamut of classical repertory, from the early Renaissance to right now. They might go several seasons without playing any Beethoven at all. They could forget about market research and “what the public wants.” By virtue of their greatness, they would be what the public wants—whether or not the public knows it yet.

For this to happen, a state-of-the-art performing space is the without-which-not—a space comparable to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Goldener Saal in Vienna or the Meyerson Center in Dallas. That need, we are told, is going to be met in the next four years.

But should that need be met, the essential need remains—the need to produce what might be called the “classical” classical Nashville Sound. If that sound should resound, the word would spread and the hall would be more than two-thirds full. To produce that sound, the orchestra has to have the hall. But it must also have players. And it must have keen and courageous leadership. None of these arrives gratis. And none can be guaranteed to stay.