This week’s recommended recording – Mozart and The Weber Sisters, featuring French soprano Sabine Devieilhe, supported by conductor Raphaël Pichon’s the Pygmalion Ensemble – gathers all the music that Mozart wrote for the Weber sisters in one collection, providing a portrait of the artist at his most personal.

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For me, the tradition of French Baroque music — with its textures of ornamentation — has always been difficult to access on an emotional level. Yet it has really opened itself up to me recently through a number of recordings, including this week’s recommendation: French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Médée as conducted by William Christie with Les Arts Florissants, a Baroque-focused chamber orchestra Christie founded in 1979.

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In almost everything he did, Debussy truly charted a new path. He blazed it with confidence and opened new perspectives for generations after him, and while I have long appreciated his entire body of work — and this string quartet in particular — I have only recently discovered this 1965 recording by the incomparable mid-century ensemble “Quartetto Italiano.”

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