Forget This Night (2023)
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE SONG CD OF THE MONTH
“Dain renders this magical snippet of music with extraordinary tenderness and intimacy. It is a rare and special thing to experience. … This is altogether a remarkable release: beautiful, intelligent and utterly heartfelt”
—Kate Wakeling, BBC Music Magazine
“Dramatically variegated … absolutely heart-rending”
—Andrew Farrach-Kolton, Gramophone
“In her outstandingly written notes, Dain compares this cycle about the death of love [Clairières dans le ciel] with Schumann’s Dichterliebe. … Its final song lasts eight minutes and marks the high point of this sublime album, astonishingly well-performed, with voice and piano in perfect symbiosis.”
—Peter van der Lint, Trouw
“The compilation of items in “Forget This Night” is just as thoughtful as the French songs gathered into their 2020 debut album, “Regards sur l’infini”. The linking theme is the passion and fragility of human relationships, and the repertoire bring many revelations, from Lili Boulanger’s emotionally adventurous cycle “Clairières dans le ciel” to a welcome dip into the pungent Polish songs of Grazyna Bacewicz. Soloist and pianist are always assured and eloquent”
—Geoff Brown, The London Times
full press coverage
about the project
Forget This Night explores impermanence and desire through songs by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz. The heart of the program is Clairières dans le ciel, Lili Boulanger’s only song cycle and an overlooked masterpiece of the genre, which maps the interior emotional landscape of someone deeply in love—from blissful awe to the devastation of abandonment. The cycle is framed by songs of Szymanowski (a contemporary of Boulanger who was also writing music of simmering passion across the continent against the backdrop of the First World War) and Bacewicz, of a generation later, who treats the same themes in songs of fresh directness and aching lyricism.
Opening with Boulanger’s first extant song, Attente, and ending with the premiere recording of a fragment for solo voice she wrote at the very end of her life, Forget This Night poses a universal human question: how wholeheartedly can we open ourselves to relationships, and moments, that will inevitably end?
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about the project
Forget This Night explores impermanence and desire through songs by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz. The heart of the program is Clairières dans le ciel, Lili Boulanger’s only song cycle and an overlooked masterpiece of the genre, which maps the interior emotional landscape of someone deeply in love—from blissful awe to the devastation of abandonment. The cycle is framed by songs of Szymanowski (a contemporary of Boulanger who was also writing music of simmering passion across the continent against the backdrop of the First World War) and Bacewicz, of a generation later, who treats the same themes in songs of fresh directness and aching lyricism.
Opening with Boulanger’s first extant song, Attente, and ending with the premiere recording of a fragment for solo voice she wrote at the very end of her life, Forget This Night poses a universal human question: how wholeheartedly can we open ourselves to relationships, and moments, that will inevitably end?
full press coverage
read more
Katharine wrote online pieces for both Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine connected with the release of Forget This Night.
The Pink Peril: Lili Boulanger, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Glass Ceilings (BBC Music Magazine)
Dichterliebe’s Daughter: Lili Boulanger’s Overlooked Masterpiece Clairières dans le ciel (Gramophone)
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Regards sur l’Infini (2020)
WINNER OF THE EDISON KLASSIEK 2021 FOR BEST DEBUT RECORDING
about the project
At the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, Katharine Dain and Sam Armstrong, longtime friends and collaborators, decided to quarantine together. They spent the quiet months in unusually deep and slow exploration of repertoire for voice and piano. Eventually this work coalesced into a song program centered around Messiaen’s extraordinary Poèmes pour Mi, composed in the early years of his marriage to Claire Delbos. The album also includes Debussy’s complete Proses lyriques as well as infrequently-performed but mesmerizing songs by Delbos (also a composer), Henri Dutilleux and Kaija Saariaho.
All the songs on the disc are deeply personal responses to text and to moments of pivotal change in the composers’ or poets’ lives. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has caused incalculable loss, it has also forced us to to pause, to try to stay present in an uncomfortable reality, to trust ourselves and our processes. Regards sur l’Infini is a collection of deeply personal stories that together tell a larger story about the restless human gaze, a personal document of an unprecedented time.
“A memorable, effortlessly polished album”
—Erica Jeal, The Guardian
“Regards sur l’Infini is impressively elegant and thoughtful”
—Geoff Brown, The Times
“Dain provides many of the translations herself and her booklet essay is sensitively penned, honest and thoughtful. Dain’s soprano has a slender, pure quality, fearless at altitude such as in Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Il pleut’, where her instrument is beautifully controlled over the droplets of rain falling from Armstrong’s piano accompaniment. His playing of the Debussy songs, in particular, has wonderful clarity. … Dutilleux’s ‘Regards sur l’infini’ is possibly the most exquisite track on the album, melancholy, confessional.”
—Mark Pullinger, Gramophone
“A memorable, effortlessly polished album”
—Erica Jeal, The Guardian
“Regards sur l’Infini is impressively elegant and thoughtful”
—Geoff Brown, The Times
“Dain provides many of the translations herself and her booklet essay is sensitively penned, honest and thoughtful. Dain’s soprano has a slender, pure quality, fearless at altitude such as in Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Il pleut’, where her instrument is beautifully controlled over the droplets of rain falling from Armstrong’s piano accompaniment. His playing of the Debussy songs, in particular, has wonderful clarity. … Dutilleux’s ‘Regards sur l’infini’ is possibly the most exquisite track on the album, melancholy, confessional.”
—Mark Pullinger, Gramophone
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Katharine wrote a piece for Gramophone magazine on the genesis of the album: That Time I Decided to Quarantine With a Pianist
“…what Sam and I discovered (or re-learned) this year, however, is that there really is no substitute for time and trust. Our best work needs slowness, space to ask questions and wait for answers, and patience with our brains and bodies as they adapt to new information. We needed every bit of the time we spent tracing and re-tracing Messiaen’s rhythms and voicings and rhetorical gestures before the music spoke clearly. I spent months singing the same phrases before prosody, breath, physicality, shadings of vowels, and imagination aligned.”
… and a personal blog post going further into the history and process: Regards sur l’Infini — Back Story
