Okay, perhaps on another beautiful day in Berkshires I shouldn’t wave goodbye so quickly to summer.  Igor Severyanin’s poem beholds daisies in perfect summer bloom, and Rachmaninoff doesn’t hold back.  I got to know the music when I was fourteen, first in the transcription for solo piano that the composer made for himself, and which Morton Estrin, my piano teacher at the time, recorded for Connoisseur Society Records.  But the song is rich and penetrating in ways that leave the piano transcription merely pretty.  I love this performance by a very young Julia Lezhneva.

Rachmaninoff, Daisies, Opus 38, no. 3
Julia Lezhneva, soprano; Michael Antonenko, piano