Circle up: The Contemporary Music Ensemble soaks up applause during their peformance Sunday night.

Chemins, by Luciano Berio, takes the original musical lines of his earlier Sequenza series and amplifies them with a larger ensemble. In a similar way, the Contemporary Music Ensemble’s Sunday evening concert in Finney Chapel elaborated on the idea of the solitary musical thread and its communal resonances.

The concert began with Berio’s Chemins II, which preserves the earlier solo viola Sequenza VI as its basic material. Fall graduate Glenda Goodman’s spiky viola double-stops recapitulated her part in the all-Berio marathon a week earlier, also in Finney. The ensemble provided a sensitive foil to her original line, at times competing with and engulfing it. The winds were especially subtle in contrast, as in Michael Finnissy’s Banumbirr, where the intimate duets between violin and flute, and cello and clarinet, played out beautifully under conductor Timothy Weiss’ impeccable and discreet direction. This piece, inspired by an Australian aborigine painting of the morning star, matched the first three not in its underlying concept but in its refreshing brevity and accessible structure.

The music of guest composer Andrew Mead, a professor at the University of Michigan, was highlighted in two pieces this evening. The first, Rhapsody for Solo Flute, nicely complemented the program’s linear trajectory. Its overall progression — moving from a play of melodic fragments and disjunct leaps, through a more active central section featuring flutter-tonguing, to a lyrical resolution capped with a witty coda — was itself mirrored by the visual effect created by six music stands lined up on stage. Recent graduate Sarah Tiedemann, ’02, gave a highly polished performance of this compelling piece, which returned the program to solo repetoire while implying a counterpoint of articulations and gestures.

The premiere of Mead’s Concerto for Solo Cello and Sixteen Players culminated the program. Preceded by three fairly brief, effective pieces, this work came off as somewhat lengthy and intractable. The sheer amount of effort condensed into its composition and performance was impressive — soloist Darrett Adkins gave a committed, compact rendering, while the ensemble’s half-circle placement exploited antiphonal effects in the central “Kaleidoscope” section. The shimmering percussion timbre of the “Prologue” returned in the “Epilogue,” blossoming into a brass-like chorale. Nevertheless, despite clarifying notes in the program, the structural intelligibility and message of the piece were dubious. Perhaps, on this program exploring the elaboration of a single musical “path,” it served as the thickest outgrowth of ivy, recombining musical styles and fragments in a rich tapestry behind the rigorous solo cello line.

How far this progressive amplification of a single path might reflect the CME’s burgeoning career is an open question. The ensemble’s recent success at Weill Recital Hall in New York City signifies a much-overdue national recognition, and highlights the fact that they deserve better audiences here in Oberlin. They epitomize a distillation of dedication and focus; the maxim of Zen Master Seung Sahn, “only go straight,” might reflect both the underlying philosophy and promise of the ensemble. If the ensemble combines its sparkling technical standards with a commitment to programming that illuminates such clear thematic threads, might not its success follow paths only now half-broken, resonating both in Oberlin and beyond?