Father's Day is sad for those of us who've lost our dads. But it's also a beautiful reason to play you, in my Dad's memory, part of his favourite symphony. Dad, who died of cancer in 1996 aged 67, used to spend many happy hours in his armchair on Sunday afternoons listening to different recordings of this work and comparing them. If anyone in the family should have been a music critic, it was him. So here are Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1945 in Brahms's Symphony No.2. This is the first installment - for the rest, click through to Youtube and follow the links. I'm off to find my hanky.
