The members of the Miro Quartet hold up their bows in the shape of an "M" in their latest publicity photos. It's to stand for Joan Miro, the surrealist painter after whom the ensemble is named, but it might as well stand for Magnificent.

		PITTSBURGH CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY Miro Quartet community concert When: 2 p.m. today at Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, Oakland. Program: Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 18, No. 4; Dvorak's String Quartet in F, "American." Tickets: Free. Miro Quartet concert When: 8 p.m. tomorrow at Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland. Program: Haydn's Quartet, Op. 76, No. 1; Glass' Quartet No. 5, Faure's Piano Quintet No. 2 (with pianist Adam Neiman). Tickets: $15 to $35; 412-624-4129.

The Miro Quartet is emerging as a quartet to be reckoned with. Critical darlings and award winners -- including from the Banff Intenational String Quartet competition and the Naumburg Chamber Music Awards -- the quartet continues to win fans wherever it plays. The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society not only hopes it will do the same in concerts today and tomorrow but has asked Miro to spend some time coaching local ensembles this weekend. No problem. The group also does that well: The University of Texas recently named it the Faculty String Quartet at its Austin campus.

At the heart of the quartet is Pittsburgher Joshua Gindele, 28, who grew up in Bradford Woods in Wexford and went to North Allegheny High School. A Pittsburgher through and through, he still roots for the Steelers and will ask for scores at intermission of Sunday concerts.

"I got into [music] because my dad wanted all of his kids to play an instrument," says Gindele, whose parents now live in Squirrel Hill. He started on violin at age 4 but was fascinated by the cello. Too diminutive to play one, a radical adjustment was made to please him.

"They put an end pin on a viola for me," he says.

With that, you might assume Gindele's career took off. But it was not the case. "I was talented but didn't have a very good work ethic," he says. "I went through a number of teachers, [including Pittsburgh Symphony musicians] Hampton Mallory and David Premo." He also shuffled through local youth ensembles, including the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestras (Symphonette).

"Back then I wasn't so serious that I was worried about it," he says. "I could play the cello well -- it didn't occur to me until later to be a musician."

In fact, it was a completely different string instrument that had his attention: the tennis racquet. "I was playing a lot of competitive tennis," says the 6-foot-2 Gindele. "I had a big serve and volley and assisted a tennis pro in Sewickley." (Although he's quick to add that his older brother, Jason, went further, winning states as a doubles player.)

But all that musical training, capped by the string program at North Allegheny run by Christine Loverti, eventually wrested Gindele's full attention. He enrolled at the Oberlin College Conservatory and instantly made a connection with a senior, the violinist Daniel Ching, laying the foundation for what eventually would be the Miro quartet. It's so-named because Gindele always felt that "Miro truly understood what creating was."

It's unusual for a senior to pair up with a freshman at Oberlin, but that was just the beginning of their extraordinary exploits. They formed a quartet that won two major national awards. "The thing that raised eyebrows was that we were so young and we worked so much, five to six hours a day," Gindele says.

As they lost their "inner voices" to other ensembles or graduation, Ching and Gindele managed to still make wise choices, finally choosing violinist Sandy Yamamoto and violist John Largess to make the Miro Quartet's final version (especially smart for Ching, who ended up marrying Yamamoto). The quartet later taught at the Juilliard School of Music before moving to Austin.

The quartet owes its success, in part, to smart programming. In an era when the quartets have expanded to perform new music, period music and popular genres the Miro Quartet has rooted itself in the core repertory.

"The voice we developed first was Haydn, then Schubert, then Beethoven," says Gindele.

It's more than those giants of the canon -- after all, every quartet learns this repertoire first. It's that the Miro Quartet has the talent and puts in the time to play that music excellently. Even with the eclecticism of today's market -- perhaps because of it -- nothing impresses more than a group that can perform the core repertoire with utter cohesiveness.

"It is really easy to get caught up in what you should be doing instead of doing what we really believe in. We believe our strength is in classical music," Gindele says.

The Miro Quartet didn't stop with the big three, of course. They took their cue from a mentor, violinist Issac Stern. "He would say, 'Kiddies, if you can play a great Mozart quartet, you can play anything in the 20th century."

And so they have, recently recording George Crumb's seminal "Black Angels" in the presence of the composer for the Crumb Edition on Bridge Records, a high honor. The ensemble will perform Philip Glass' Quartet No. 5 and Faure's Piano Quintet No. 2 to go with a Haydn quartet (Op. 76, No. 1) for their concert in Pittsburgh.

And the Miro doesn't shirk or dislike the trends of today.

"We play tangos, but as encores," says Gindele. "We have been playing in bars; that is not a traditional stage presentation."

In fact, the Miro performed with bar-hopping cellist Matt Haimovitz in Club Cafe last year. But rather than move the quartet to other genres, the Miro wants "to make the classics more accessible."

Make that "M" for Masterful.