(FORTUNE Magazine) – With dozens of recordings of Beethoven's string quartets already on the market, even the most ardent classical music fan has to wonder: Do we really need another collection of these works? Well, we do if the recording is from the Emerson String Quartet, arguably the world's best group of chamber musicians. Most complete recordings of these quartets suffer from a certain sameness, as if they've been played by a single machine. Not the 21-year-old Emerson quartet, which treats each movement as if it's a chapter in a great novel. The cumulative impact of listening to these seven CDs ($110) in sequence is comparable to reading Anna Karenina--long but magnificent. Highlight: the struggle against chaos depicted in the late quartets, which Beethoven completed in 1826 when he was completely deaf. Even the superb renditions of these works by the Juilliard String Quartet don't capture Beethoven's last gasps of anguish the way this recording does.

--Ed Brown