MUSIC REVIEW : Smooth Vermeer Veneer : The Chicago-based string quartet opens chamber-music series at Founders Hall with works Webern, Schubert.

The Vermeer Quartet took no risks when it sandwiched ear-stretching music by Anton von Webern between works in a familiar idiom and the intermission, to open the latest Founders Hall chamber music series, Sunday afternoon at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The idea is to keep the audience from fleeing.

But the catch was that one of the easier pieces was by Webern, whose name may still frighten off many, even if the works date from the first decade of the century.

“Langsamer Satz,” composed in 1905 when he was 22 and about a year into his apprenticeship with Schoenberg, proved that Webern could have extended the twilight years of late-Romanticism. With its lush, Brahmsian line, lovingly etched by the players, it provides probably one of the few works by this composer that the audience can hear and leave humming.

However, Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, written four years later, transpires in another universe entirely, one that is atonal, athematic and uncompromisingly compact.

The Chicago-based Vermeer--violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pierre Menard, violist Richard Young and cellist Marc Johnson--played the work as if to the manner born.

Whether the demands were for cushy textures or ghostly harmonics, impassioned declamations or utterances of the gentlest restraint, the players showed faultless ensemble and rapt consideration for the music and each other.

Webern apparently told Berg that this music reflected his memory of the death of his mother, and in the hands of these musicians, lament, protest and bewilderment readily found expression.

Perhaps it had taken them some time to take the measure of the acoustic of the Costa Mesa hall, however. Earlier, in Schubert’s “Quartettsatz,” Ashkenasi’s overly insistent drive and pointing of line and accent ensured dramatic tension but at the expense of lyric reflection as well as intonation on occasion.

He also often over-dominated his colleagues, although they readily negotiated the composer’s severe demands.

More balanced was the playing in Mendelssohn’s Quartet No. 4, which the Vermeer had offered at the Ford Amphitheatre in August. Mendelssohn’s rhetoric may not merit the pumped-up drama the Vermeer brought to the work. But the impassioned playing in the coda brought the kind of cheers one rarely hears from an audience at a chamber music event.

In response, the musicians played the last movement of Boccherini’s Quartet in A, Opus 33, No. 6, as an encore.