MUSIC : Musicians Playing on a Smaller Scale : Violist and cellist, once with Pacific Symphony, gave up orchestra work to help form Angeles Quartet.

Two fine Orange County musicians seemed to disappear from the local scene in recent seasons. But violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody, both prominent in the Pacific Symphony, had not given up music. They simply decided to turn their efforts to chamber music.

Along with Kathleen Lenski, a former concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Roger Wilkie, concertmaster of the Long Beach Symphony, the two formed the Angeles Quartet in 1988 and began racking up the kind of enthusiastic reviews usually reserved for ensembles that have played together for a long time.

The Angeles Quartet will play works by Mozart, Ravel and Dvorak today at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. Peter Orth will appear as guest pianist. The program is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society.

Do the two miss playing in an orchestra?

“Not really,” Dembow said in a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I wondered if there is life without it and found out there certainly is. The quartet repertory is fantastic.”

Erdody agreed. “I don’t miss orchestra playing,” he said. “A lot of people don’t realize what we really have. It’s really a gold mine.”

Dembow and Erdody actually had played together before the Pacific. Both were in the New York String Quartet, formed when they were students at the Juilliard School of Music in New York.

“We were all students trying to make it, just learning this stuff and doing the best we could,” Erdody recalled. “My naivete kept me motivated. Obviously, I was immature at 22, playing the stuff for the first time. I didn’t really have a grasp on what was there.”

Not surprisingly, he said, the New York Quartet broke up “for personality reasons.”

“Four is a very difficult number,” Erdody said. “Three is easier to work with. You can’t have one against one. It’s either one against two or two against one or everyone’s happy. But there’s a polarization that happens in a string quartet.”

Those personal stresses still arise, he said, “but I feel I’m a lot easier in terms of interpersonal relationships.”

“Sometimes when we’re really busy and have things to do,” he said, “we don’t see our (spouses) very often. We see each other a lot more. We rehearse however long it takes because we don’t have union time restraints. Our nerves can get shot. We want to see each other, but we all have families.

Dembow added: “Even if we had an opportunity to play as many quartet concerts as other groups, I don’t think we would choose to do that. All of us very concerned with family life and having some sense of being rooted in home values.”

Right now, the Angeles Quartet plays about 40 concerts a year and operates on a shoestring budget.

“Basically we divide all of our expenses equally,” Erdody said. “Our motivation is not financial at this point. We’re not making great amounts of money. We do want to earn a living at it. But we know we have to pay our dues.”

Members pay their bills, he said, by playing as free-lance musicians in Hollywood studios. Erdody also teaches at UC Irvine.

“We’re still in the developmental stage,” Erdody said. “The Guarneri Quartet has played for 30 years. The Juilliard Quartet. . . for 40 years. They know exactly what they’re going to do. There isn’t going to be much veering from that.

“We never look for the definitive performance. That’s just sort of a pipe dream. We try to do whatever we are at that point in our conceptual arrangement. That’s what we shoot for. We have an idea, and that’s what we try to do.”

Repertory seems to fall into place rather easily for the group, said Dembow.

“One of life’s better problems to encounter is what repertory should a quartet play for a season,” he said. “There is such a body of incredible works we’re looking forward to doing, it doesn’t much matter what we pick.”

Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet, which is on the program at the Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight, was recorded by the group recently as a laser videodisc.

“I thought we had a fairly good interpretive jump on the piece when we first started it,” said Erdody, “but now I feel we’ve gone much further. That comes from playing it a lot.”

But the group also looks for expanding its repertory all the time, he said. Peter Orth, a friend of Lenski’s, will be coming out from his home in New York just to play the Dvorak Piano Quintet on tonight’s program. It is his first time playing the work.

“It’s an extremely difficult piece,” Orth said, “but not because of technique. First off, the piano has an interesting role in this piece because it’s more integrated than in most quartets.

“But it’s also difficult because it’s extraordinarily hackneyed. Each of us comes to it with preconceptions of what it should be. . . . That’s a hard thing to overcome.”

* The Angeles Quartet and guest pianist Peter Orth will play works by Mozart, Ravel and Dvorak tonight at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. The program is sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Tickets: $10 to $20. Information: (714) 646-6277.