AS HE HAS BEFORE, Dan Wyman attended the weekend's premiere performance of his latest San Jose Chamber Orchestra commission. On Sunday, the strings played Stepping Stones, a 10-minute romp through just about every kind of thing one can do on a violin. His program note proposed a search for footing across a stream that has washed away evidence of a previous path, "rushing, flowing, turning and, occasionally for a moment, resting." Pretty tough not to hear those things with such a written description. Put another way, it did not disappoint.

Tony Quartuccio was on the podium for the Sunday performance, sandwiching the Wyman between a pubescent string symphony by Mendelssohn and Bartók's Music for String, Percussion and Celesta. Wyman's piece begins as surging rapids that soon settle into a regular, if short-lived, pulsation. Meter changes soon disguise any steadiness of beat, then, full stop. Tremolos start the next section, which features concertante solos, harmonics and sighing glissandos. Effects include brittle sul ponticello (bowing close to the bridge), skittering gestures, buzzing bees, a brief nod to Steve Reich–style minimalism and a big trainlike acceleration finale. Tunefulness took the form of brief ostinatos tossed around the orchestra. In all, the piece was coherent, bracing, full of delightful surprises and in need of repeated hearings to get all the goods.

Mendelssohn was 13 when he wrote his String Symphony in D (and several others around the same time). It (as they all do) follows the classical model as taught to the boy, in Berlin, by Carl Friedrich Zelter. While conventional in most respects, this ambitious work contains some unusual features. The second movement is given over to three (of four) violas, featuring solo playing (by section principal Eleanor Angel), plus added cello and bass. The final movement, having establishing its own theme, then indulges in Beethoven-style development inspired, specifically, by a variation from the last movement of that composer's Eroica Symphony.

The Bartók roped in the talents of timpanist Kent Reed, percussionist Ward Spangler, celestist Brenda Tom, harpist Anna Maria Mendieta and pianist Michael Touchi. Commissioned by Paul Sacher for his chamber orchestra in Basel, the work celebrates to a high degree the treasury of Romanian and Hungarian folk music the composer had spent earlier years collecting. Folk-inspired themes and rhythms run riot throughout, along with aural allusions to folk instruments. Yet it bristles with sophisticated inventions, surprising instrumental combinations and delectable turns of phrase.

Kudos all around for a fine performance, with one big bone to pick. Le Petit Trianon offers an inherently lively, even loud, acoustic response to music. What this orchestra needs are conductors who explore the full range of dynamic contrasts. What it got here, and what I have heard from music director Barbara Day Turner, is not nearly enough of it, and no such thing at all as a real pianissimo. Dynamic contrast gives music its 3-D, its light and shadows. The SJCO and its audiences deserve better.

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