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Age: 102
Subscriber for: 45 Years
Date of first ACO concert: 1980
Favourite ACO concert: Reflections on Gallipoli (2015)
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“I have to remind myself that I am 102-going-on-103. Do I still want to be alive? Yes I do!”
We are in the home of the oldest known Australian Chamber Orchestra subscriber, Norma Disher Hawkins, and she’s just brought two full cups of coffee into the living room, her ornate varnished wooden walking stick swinging off her arm as she shuffles through.
She lives for music. Even her doorbell plays Beethoven (Für Elise).
She has been an ACO subscriber for 45 years, since 1980, and remembers the time of John Harding and Carl Pini leading the Orchestra. And she remembers when, in 1990, a 25-year-old Richard Tognetti took over at the helm.
“I remember the first time we saw Richard,” Norma says with a fond chuckle. “We were sitting parallel with the stage, and he came out with a dark suit on, with loose, baggy pants, and boots. He had curly, fair hair, and he had a little diamond stud in his ear.”
Richard brought something very different from previous leaders of the ACO.
“We were a bit startled,” Norma says. “It was definitely a change from Carl Pini! But when he started to play… well, blimey! I mean, it was exciting.”
Richard’s first hallmark transformation of the Orchestra was to have the musicians standing during performance. “I think everybody [in the Orchestra] was standing up from the word ‘go’,” Norma recalls. The Orchestra had been seated during performances before, and now the only ones sitting down were the cellists.
“Immediately the reaction – from the critics as well – was about the energy that the Orchestra now had [standing up],” Norma remembers. “We were all very excited.
The season after that, the Orchestra had a designer who made all the costumes. They were blue and green [like] the sea, and then the next season they were all cerise.
And then the next season they were all black again, and I thought, ‘oh, that’s a relief!’, she laughs.
“So many people say to me, ‘I don’t understand the music’. But you don’t have to understand it! You just have to let it come to you, and let it sweep over you.”Norma Disher Hawkins, ACO Subscriber
Norma, who lives in her own home in Sydney, has an irrepressible passion for music. When she was just 15, she would save up five shillings a week to attend ABC Orchestra performances at the Sydney Town Hall. She queued outside the Town Hall from 5pm on the dot, waiting for the chance to file through and rush for an empty seat on the side of the stage, listening from as close to the orchestra as possible.
When she married at the age of 55, her husband, Bruce, shared her love of music.
“Bruce was working as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and he would come home announcing he’d subscribed to different orchestras,” Norma recalls.
“He came home one day and said the Australian Ensemble has been formed, and I’ve subscribed. And very quickly we joined Musica Viva, and then the ACO,” she says.
Bruce and Norma consumed countless concerts through subscriptions to Musica Viva, Australian Ensemble, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Macquarie Trio.
“We were saturated with music!” she smiles.
“When my husband died in 1998 I kept our two ACO seats going, and I took always somebody with me,” she says. “I wanted to share the music.”
And for Norma, music is for everybody.
“So many people say to me, ‘I don’t understand the music’,” she says. “But you don’t have to understand it,” she emphasises. “You just have to let it come to you, and let it sweep over you.
“Listen to it, and you’ll find a tune. And then concentrate on that tune, and you’ll hear variations of it. And it’s exciting, you know?”
After so many years subscribing to the ACO, it’s of course difficult for Norma to pick one favourite concert. But one does stand out, and it brings tears to Norma’s eyes as she thinks about it:
“I do think the concert Richard devised for the celebration of Anzac Day, Reflections on Gallipoli, was inspired. The Lark Ascending sequence where he had the photographs, the series of close ups of young men from Turkey and from Australia, showing young soldiers whose eyes told us they were frightened, was incredibly powerful.”
Norma also cites Shostakovich’s Concerto for Trumpet, Violin and Strings, and Weimar Cabaret, the ACO’s program with comedian Barry Humphries, Meow Meow and ACO Principal Violin Satu Vänskä singing, among her highlights, as well as “anything by Tchaikovsky or Schubert.”
We can’t wait to see our oldest music fan at the next ACO concert.
