Vienna-Born, Cincinnati-Trained : Music: Artis String Quartet went to Ohio for teaching it couldn’t get at home. It plays Costa Mesa tonight.

You’d think that a string quartet born and bred in Vienna, considered by many to be the capital of the classical music world, would need look no farther than the end of its bows to find the very best in musical training.

Austria’s Artis String Quartet needed to go to Ohio to find what it needed to better itself.

“It’s ridiculous, but we had to go to Cincinnati,” Artis first violinist Peter Schuhmayer explained last week in a phone interview from Burlington, Vt., where the quartet began a U.S. tour that includes a stop tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The trip was necessary, Schuhmayer said, because of long-held Viennese traditions of string-quartet performance that prized sound production and expression uber alles , even if that meant playing that was schlampig, sloppy.

Despite the legacy of the Second Viennese School, led by Arnold Schoenberg between 1910 and 1930, change has come only reluctantly to Viennese practices.

In fact, when the Artis Quartet was founded 15 years ago, the old ways were still pretty much as they had been before Schoenberg and company.

According to Schuhmayer, the members of the LaSalle Quartet--who had immigrated to the United States from Berlin, attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York and eventually all became professors at the University of Cincinnati--were among the preeminent exponents of the other Viennese tradition. The Schoenberg school espoused a more objective, more analytical approach that Schuhmayer describes as “the intellectual Jewish tradition”:

“All the painters in Vienna, in Middle Europe, and the composers, they were the people who did all these beautiful new things,” Schuhmayer said. “They emigrated because of the Nazi regime. The [LaSalle] second violinist, too, had been in the concentration camp, near to death.

“The Nazi regime more or less burned out this great Jewish tradition from Middle Europe. But in the end this was not possible.”

As a result of their studies with Walter Levin, first violinist of the LaSalle Quartet, today “we are living that tradition again in Vienna,” Schuhmayer said.

None of the Artis quartet members--Schuhmayer, violinist Johannes Meissl, violist Herbert Kefer and cellist Othmar Muller--are Jewish. Schuhmayer also noted that they do not consider themselves revolutionaries, but followers of the example and advice provided them by the Alban Berg Quartet, which had earlier made the pilgrimage to Cincinnati.

Now, when the Artis musicians play, they hope to do so not only with marvelous sound production and expression, but also cleanly and, uber alles , with respect for the score.

On tonight’s program in Founders Hall, they’ll apply that attitude to Mozart’s Quartet No. 4 in C, K. 157; Mendelssohn’s Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 13, and Alexander Zemlinsky’s Quartet No. 2, Op. 15.

On paper, it would seem that the Zemlinsky work--he was one of Schoenberg’s teachers in Vienna--would be closest to the mind-set of the Artis String Quartet.

“That’s true,” Schuhmayer said. “Also the second Zemlinsky quartet is the first piece we studied with the LaSalle in 1984. So it’s a kind of conclusion.” (The LaSalle Quartet was the first to record all four Zemlinsky quartets.)

“It’s a piece without breaks between movements, 38 minutes, very intense, very expressionistic and romantic both,” he said. “We love this piece from first note to last; we play it often, often, often. If you play a piece very often, sometimes you are bored, but we never had this with the Zemlinsky. . . . And never as far as I know has there been a disappointed person in the concert hall.”

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Their brief U.S. tour ends in Lincoln, Neb., on Nov. 11. Starting the tour at the Mozart festival allowed the group both to play a concert and meet with its U.S. management, which is based in Burlington.

According to Schuhmayer, management is both boon and bane.

“A good musician is nothing without a good manager, and that is very disappointing,” he said. “You can play a good concert, and if your manager is not fast enough to get a re-invitation, well, there are a lot of very good musicians today. One week after your concert, there will be another good concert, and if that manager is better, you can lose that invitation.

“It is very disappointing because it has nothing to do with music-making. But it’s not possible to do this on your own. You have to concentrate on music-making--there’s brain work to be done.”

* The Artis String Quartet plays works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Zemlinsky tonight in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $20. (714) 556-2787.