PERFORMING ARTS : Have Strings, Will Travel : Founded in China and based in Virginia, the 11-year-old Shanghai Quartet tries to raise its recognition level in a crowded marketplace.

Whatever you do, don’t call the Shanghai Quartet “young.”

“We think we passed the stage of being a young string quartet,” said first violinist Weigang Li. “People still call us that. But I think we are at a different stage now.”

Indeed, since the quartet was founded in China in 1983, it has racked up impressive critical honors and landed a recording contract with Delos, even though all the current members--violinists Li and Yiwen Jiang, violist Honggang Li (Weigang’s brother) and cellist James Wilson--are only in their early 30s. But widespread recognition still eludes them.

The quartet was created because the Chinese authorities wanted an ensemble to enter the prestigious Portsmouth (England) International Quartet competition in 1985. Four students from the Shanghai Conservatory were chosen, including the two brothers.

“They considered us among the best students in the conservatory,” Weigang Li said in a recent phone interview from Richmond, Va., where the quartet is in residency at the University of Richmond. “We were pretty disciplined and musical. They knew we would work hard to have a chance to go to England. And we did.”

The surprise was how well that work paid off. “We thought we would get through the first round--that way we wouldn’t lose face when we went back. Actually, we won second place. We came close to winning, a jury member told us later, but we didn’t do that well on the second round. That really inspired us. We thought maybe we should stick together.”

He was 19 at the time. His brother was 20.

“Ours was the third generation in our family to play the violin,” Weigang Li said. “We had no choice. We had to play. Our parents insisted. I am very grateful about that right now.”

The boys’ parents survived the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976 with the death of Mao Zedong, by avoiding Western music “entirely,” he said. “They played Chinese music only.” While the two brothers are young enough to have missed most of the havoc, they did have to deal with its anti-Western legacy.

“We had no chamber music tradition in China,” he said. “We had nothing. There were few records. We would grab one and listen to it many, many times. When foreign musicians visited the conservatory, we would try to grab them and get as much coaching as possible.

“So we really did start from zero. We worked really really hard, seven hours a day, every day, every year, 365 days a year.”

When the original quartet members returned to Shanghai from the Portsmouth Festival, they realized they wanted to continue their studies in the West. The training in China, was “very good, very technical . . . ,” Weigang Li said. “You had to be really precise and play everything perfectly. In terms of style, however, it’s really a little bit behind. They try very hard, and very often they really don’t know where they’re going. ‘Is this the right style for Mozart or Brahms?’ They have a feeling, but they don’t know if they’re right.”

They got permission to leave China to study at Northern Illinois University, where they worked with the Vermeer Quartet from 1985-87. “When we came here, wow, it was great,” he said. “You could go to a record store and find almost anything you could imagine. Even more than you could imagine.”

They made their New York debut at Town Hall in 1987 and began a steady accumulation of critical accolades. The New York Times praised their “aristocratic style” and added that “for poetry, intelligence and musical sympathy, the Shanghai Quartet counts among the finest young foursomes of the day.”

European critics chimed in. The quartet’s playing of Bartok’s First Quartet was “so rapturously temperamental, so expressive and so precise at the same time that one could not wish for a better reading,” wrote a critic in Die Welt.

Just as their career began taking off, however, their success was imperiled by a series of personnel changes that continued even as recently as last year.

Their first cellist, Xing-Hua Ma, left the group in 1985 to study at Yale. Until 1990, when Wilson joined the quartet, the cellist’s chair was filled by three different musicians.

“The first year we had two temporary cellists and then Kathe Jarka auditioned and joined us for four years,” Weigang Li said. “She was wonderful. But we were playing lots of concerts and traveling around. You have to play a lot as a young quartet. It was very tiring. She said, ‘This schedule is just crazy.’ She couldn’t handle it any more. So she left.”

Then last year, Zheng Wang, the quartet’s original violist, married a German woman and moved to Germany. “His leaving was a big shock,” Weigang Li said. “He had been with us 11 years. We were very worried. A good violist is very hard to get.”

They auditioned a number of people, including violinists who could also play viola. “Look at the Guarneri Quartet,” he said. “Michael Tree was a violinist before he was a violist, and the violists of the Vermeer and Tokyo also began by playing violin.”

The strategy worked, but not as they expected. The auditions turned up Yiwen Jiang, a good violinist from Beijing. “We knew he was excellent,” Weigang Li said. “We’ve actually known each other since we were 6 or 7 years old.” But he couldn’t play the viola.

So the brothers began wondering if maybe one of them could take over that instrument. “Honggang practiced for a few days. He had never played viola before. We ran through some things. It worked.”

Throughout the changes in personnel, the quartet was either on the road or performing at “home,” in Richmond. The residency, which started in 1989, has offered the group a crucial financial safety net, as well as giving them opportunities to teach and to play.

Making it professionally is tough, said Wilson, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when there’s been this much competition for the performing market. It almost is necessary to have some kind of residency, like we do. It gives you a base to go from.”

Still, Virginia is not New York, which remains the mecca for career-minded classical musicians. But Weigang Li doesn’t feel isolated.

“We play in New York several times a year, and we’re always received well there,” he said. “We play over 50 concerts, spread out over the whole year, including summer. We do go to Europe once or twice every year. Nobody knows where you come from. They think you’re coming from New York.

“But, as one of our teachers said, it takes a quartet a decade to take off. So I guess we’ve played about seven years in the United States. So we’ll just keep playing.

“We’re hopeful. We love what we do, and we love it even more after years of work. We don’t think we will quit. I strongly believe we can play well enough that we can make it, if not today, maybe in the near future.”

* The Shanghai Quartet will play works by Mozart, Beethoven and Zhou Long today at 2 p.m. at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron St., Los Angeles. The program is sponsored by the library and the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies. $10. (213) 731-8529.