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Age: 77
Subscriber for: 20 Years
Date of first ACO concert: 1993
Favourite ACO concert: ACO Soloists (Satu performing Locatelli’s The Harmonic Labyrinth)
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“In my youth, I wanted to exchange lives with Annie Lennox or Laurie Anderson,” ACO Subscriber Susan Maxwell-Stewart reminiscences, “but now that would be Satu Vänskä.”
The Australian Chamber Orchestra joined Susan’s list of music loves, which is built from “artists like Laurie Anderson, Robbie Robertson, Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads,” in the early ’90s when she went along to her first ACO concert, and more than two decades later she was blown away by ACO Principal Violin Satu Vänskä’s performance of Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in D major The Harmonic Labyrinth.
“I was seated beside two other old biddies, the three of us stunned and gasping for air at the performance’s conclusion,” Susan laughs.
Now based in Perth, via long stints living all over the world including in New Mexico and India, Susan has a history with music, having played the electric dulcimer during her time living in India, improvising as part of a dance band.
“Music had always been vital yet, apart from one Glenn Gould cassette, my love of classical had mostly been replaced by jazz and alternative artists,” Susan says. Seeing Richard Tognetti and the ACO in Perth with a friend changed that.
“I remember wonderfully intense and unconventional playing, all musicians young, clad in black and standing, longhaired Richard Tognetti a bobbing -weaving genius surfer with the violin,” she remembers fondly. “It’s always an unmistakable quality. They play from the inside, instead of the outside, and it’s about more than just playing through the notes.”
“I remember wonderfully intense and unconventional playing, all musicians young, clad in black and standing, longhaired Richard Tognetti a bobbing -weaving genius surfer with the violin,”Susan Maxwell-Stewart, ACO Subscriber
“The ACO is not only playing with brilliant technique but also a hundred percent from the inside, yes, and that is a rare quality,” she reinforces. “I may not be a classically-trained musician, but I have the kind of ear where I can pick that quality up; that they’re not just sitting on their arses digesting dinner, they’re really playing!”
Susan became a subscriber, and has devoured ACO concerts – including digital content during the Covid-19 pandemic – ever since.
“I was blown away by the ACO’s magnificently-filmed Tabula Rasa StudioCast,” Susan says, referring to the series of cinematic films capturing the Orchestra when lockdown had put the possibility of live concerts in jeopardy. “In no concert hall would I similarly howl and weep as I was able to in my living room, nor see so closely the musicians’ emotion-etched faces.”
Susan names other highlights in her time subscribing to the ACO as Giovanni Solima’s 2016 tour with the Orchestra, as well as a small ACO group performing chamber music by Marin Marais.
She says she donates to the Orchestra whenever possible, including when “unrealistic.”
“Because it gives me selfish joy and a sense of participation,” Susan says. “I am unreligious, yet an ACO devotee, rapt in its always wild exhilarating brilliance.”
