The year 2000 marks the 25th anniversary year of Dimitri Shostakovich's death in 1975. Highly acclaimed and much misunderstood during his turbulent lifetime, the staying power of the Russian composer's best works is a fact of life, and one that doesn't go unnoticed by the recording industry. One needs a lifetime, for instance, to hear all the versions past, present, and future of the First, Fifth, and Tenth Symphonies, the First Violin Concerto, the Piano Quintet and Trio, and the Cello Sonata.

This wasn't always the case for his string quartets. To be sure, ensembles like the Beethoven Quartet and the 1960s incarnation of the Borodin Quartet made memorable, pioneering recordings in their native Russia, often under the composer's supervision, when the ink was still wet on the manuscript page, so to speak. During the past quarter-century, however, numerous young quartets emerged who looked upon traversing the 15 Shostakovich quartets as a rite of passage equal to giving a complete Beethoven cycle, or surveying the six Bartok works in this genre. Consequently, the catalogs are filled to the brim with multiple versions. Unlike the Beethoven and Bartok quartets, Shostakovich's 15 don't offer a judicious "early, middle, and late" representation of his creative career, as do his symphonies. When Shostakovich penned his First Quartet in 1938, he had retreated from the brash, freewheeling music-making of his 20s into the accessible syntax characterizing his Fifth Symphony. While this transformation was a direct result of the Stalin regime breathing down the composer's neck, one readily perceives the biting irony lurking beneath the ill-fitting mask Shostakovich was obliged to don.

At the same time, the music abounds in technical features that would emerge in almost all his quartets. You get clear-cut forms and terse expression, plus lean textures from which you can take dictation no matter how busy the writing. There are ample solo opportunities and recitative-like passages, yet no virtuosity for its own sake. Imagine some of Aaron Copland's craggier, asymmetrical motives without the uplifting factor, add an extra dose of moaning half-step progressions, and you've got a Shostakovich scherzo. As he grew older and frailer, Shostakovich's last quartets, in turn, became more concentrated in thought, fragile in expression, formally courageous (his last quartet is an unbroken, six-movement chain, all marked adagio), and bleaker than Siberia.

Stemming from live performances taped at the Aspen Music Festival, the Emerson Quartet presents the cycle in chronological order. The exceptions are the quartet arrangements of the "Polka" from the Age of Gold ballet and "Katerina's Aria" from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which serve as apt curtain raisers to the Eleventh Quartet's biting pastiche. Put simply, the Emerson Quartet has never played better on disc, in terms of technical mastery, idiomatic insight, and communicative ebb and flow. Unlike its sometimes-overphrased Beethoven, or the steel-trap precision of its Bartok, the perfection of the quartet's ensemble playing is always channeled towards where the music wants to go. The swift tempos and incisive, yet songful phrasing underline the composer's inherent classicism, while looking his morbid playfulness straight in the eye.

Naturally, there are other valid and viable approaches to these scores, as exemplified by the Borodin (BMG/Melodiya) and Shostakovich Quartet's (Olympia) greater deliberation, meatier textures, and angst-on-sleeve melodicism. And the atmospheric sonics and dignified restraint of the early-'70s Fitzwilliam Quartet cycle (Decca) has not aged a bit (these British musicians worked briefly with the composer). Future ensembles, however, likely will regard the present release as a benchmark whose standards will be difficult to equal, let alone surpass. The performances are gorgeously engineered, and applause is retained at the end of each work. Occasional stage noises and audience coughs don't matter in the face of supreme music making on such a high technical and emotional level. If only the composer were still around to hear this.