O.C. MUSIC REVIEW : Cuarteto Performs at Center : * The players are eloquent and committed spokesmen for literature by Latin American and Spanish composers.

It’s a little early in the year to be handing out accolades of this sort, but any quartet we’re likely to hear locally in 1992 will be hard pressed to equal, much less surpass, the playing of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano on Tuesday at Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The four proved eloquent and committed spokesmen for a repertory largely neglected on standard chamber-music programs--namely literature by Latin American and Spanish composers.

It is unjustly overlooked music, on the basis of this program that included quartets by Juan Crisostomo Arriaga (representing Spain), Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazil), Manuel Enriquez (Mexico) and Alberto Ginastera (Argentina).

Only a nagging question about how the four Mexico City-based musicians would fare with more traditional literature hung over an otherwise exemplary concert.

An easy explanation for the top-drawer playing would involve a theory of sibling compatibility, as three of the musicians--violinists Saul Bitran and Aron Bitran and cellist Alvaro Bitran--are brothers. But that would fail to account for the completely sympathetic and vivid contributions of violist Javier Montiel.

Simply to hear the way these musicians built a chord or passed a phrase from one person to another conjured the image of a single musician playing a single instrument, although opportunities for individual expression were hardly neglected.

Sheer beauty of tone, however, was not a priority. The players seemed much more interested in rugged vitality, and intonation sometimes suffered as a result.

But one could hardly imagine a more persuasive case being made for this repertory. Details were precise without being fussy. Musical lines were drawn out without loss of energy or purpose. Interpretations were meticulous and lively, without loss of a sense of sweep and spontaneity.

They brought edgeless attack, vibrancy and limpid grace to the bittersweet tensions and complexities of Arriaga’s Quartet No. 1, written approximately three years before the precocious composer’s death at 19.

With straight-faced seriousness, they explored the perfumed lyricism and cockeyed, kaleidoscopic mood changes of Villa-Lobos’ endearing String Quartet No. 5 (one of 17 he wrote).

After intermission, they plumbed the thornier depths and compacted rhythmic challenges of the first quartets by Enriquez and Ginastera.

They negotiated Enriquez’s fugal constructions and coloristic effects with eminent unanimity and played Ginastera’s breathless rhythms with dead-on accuracy and his poetic musings with riveting drama.

Justly called back for an encore, they played the second movement of Villa-Lobos’ Quartet No. 1.