Regards sur l’Infini is the debut album of soprano Katharine Dain and pianist Sam Armstrong. It will be released on 27 November 2020 on Dutch label 7 Mountain Records.

The album is collection of French songs centered on Olivier Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi. It also includes the complete Proses lyriques of Debussy, as well as excerpts from the little-known L’âme en bourgeon by Claire Delbos (the first wife of Messiaen) and single songs by Henri Dutilleux and Kaija Saariaho.

Katharine and Sam, longtime friends and collaborators, decided to quarantine together starting in March 2020 at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in Europe. This album is the result of an unusually deep, open-ended, and trusting process of rehearsal and discovery, worked slowly while the world was largely still.

Months of quarantine have yielded an unprecedented result of nearly heavenly beauty. … The symbiosis between voice and piano is awe-inspiring. Rarely can such unity be found in this music: momentous irruptions of light; consonances chosen for their specific colours… — Leidsch Dagblad

Read more about the album in Katharine’s blog.