Mieczyslaw Weinberg (Sovietperiod: Vainberg) is an extremely subtle and delicate composer: the music breathes a warmth that is seldom found in contemporary classical music. Yet upon hearing Weinberg's works one is startled by their intrinsic power. The composer was a very modest person, and because of this he has remained unknown and in the shadow of others, even though his music is no less great.

These were the six quartets that caused Haydn to tell Mozart's father that his son was the finest composer in the world--and Haydn wasn't just saying that because Mozart dedicated the pieces to him. In richness of invention, density of thought, length, and melodic appeal, these pieces set new standards for the medium. However, they are not easy pieces to play or to listen to, and the Juilliard Quartet's lean, emphatic approach works very well in clarifying the busy textures and maximizing the music's dramatic impact. And at budget price, this three-disc set belongs in every string-quartet lover's collection.

In his 90th year, Elliott Carter is doing something few nonagenarians ever do: he's premiering a striking new string quartet, his fifth. And it's an awe-inspiring piece. The Arditti String Quartet takes up the short phrases that run with and then against one another with sureness, plucking and scraping and making their bows sing. They then delve into each of the five interludes that interrogate the quartet's six sections and play through the disparate splinters of tone and flushes of midrange color as if they were perfectly logical developments. Which they're not. Carter has again brilliantly scripted a chatter of stringed voices--à la the second quartet--that converse quickly, sometimes mournfully, but never straightforwardly. This complexity of conversation is a constant for Carter, coming sharply to light in "90+" and then in Rohan de Saram and Ursula Oppens's heaving read of the 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano, as well as in virtually all these pieces. This is a monumental recording, extending the documented work of a lamentably underappreciated American composer.

Rarely do we come across as intimate and wide-angled a set as this collection of Dmitri Shostakovich's 15 string quartets, all of them played by the Russian Borodin Quartet. Recorded in Moscow between 1978 and 1983, the quartets are excellently reproduced in digital sound by Sviatoslav Richter, who maintains just enough shadow from the old Melodiya vinyl's audio verite to make the music breathe passionately...