RNZ Concert’s new Manager: passion for music and radio
Liisa McMillan
“…wants to deliver excellence and allow more people to enjoy Concert…”
Liisa McMillan became Manager of RNZ Concert just three months ago. I talked to her recently about her aspirations for Concert and its audience and the impact of the campaign, Save RNZ Concert.
RNZ Concert’s new manager is very much a radio person. Liisa McMillan has worked in radio since high school when she and a friend co-produced a New Zealand popular music show for Access Radio. In her professional career of over thirty years she’s been sound engineer, radio producer, digital media producer and content editor, working mostly in public broadcasting through RNZ.
The other consistent thread has been her passion for music. In fact, McMillan says, her earliest memory is of hearing a song on the radio as a pre-schooler over breakfast weetbix. Her family was musical, her mother and paternal grandmother playing the piano and the house full of records and music.
McMillan describes her musical tastes as “pretty broad and broadening as I grow older. I was a child of the 70’s and 80’s, so it was rock and post-punk; when I first heard New Zealand music it moved me strongly and I became fanatical about sharing that experience.” Her radio career took her from engineering towards production of music programmes. “I did lots and learned heaps, a documentary series on Flying Nun records, helping with the Enzology documentary series about Split Enz, original music reviewing shows which became The Sampler and a series called Musical Chairs for many years, basically an oral history of people working in the music industry.”
In her new Concert role she’s on “a huge learning curve” about classical repertoire. “Like most New Zealanders I have an interest in classical music but not a whole depth of knowledge. Being surrounded by hugely knowledgeable experts is a golden opportunity. I learned piano and did drums as a child, but it became clear quite early that I’m not a performer; I like to be in supporting roles in the background pushing the brave people forward. My main thing is that I’m a huge fan of music.”
McMillan will need to be one of the “brave people” in her new role. Being a champion for musicians and composers will be important and so will looking after a network and staff team that has not always enjoyed strong support within its own organisation. In February 2020 RNZ Concert faced the biggest threat to its existence ever with a board-sanctioned management proposal for music at RNZ that took away Concert’s FM transmission network and most of its human and financial resources. In the face of furious nationwide protests from both Concert’s loyal audience and the arts sector, including orchestras, Government intervened and RNZ management and board backed off from the destructive plans.
Following those protests and during COVID lockdowns and concert cancellations in 2020, the audience for RNZ Concert grew substantially. “And we got amazing audience feedback over that time,” McMillan says, “about how important it was for people’s mental health. They were scared, lonely, anxious, nervous or bored and they found something in the music to lift their spirits. ‘Respite’ was a word that came up often.”
McMillan emphasises that RNZ Concert’s partnerships with the APO and other New Zealand orchestras, chamber groups and soloists will continue to be important. “Our own performers and composers are what make us special and unique as Aotearoa New Zealand. People hearing them all over the country has to be good for the whole ecosystem. We want to be at the important cultural moments, from the Big Sing to the Lexus Song Quest, and capture those and offer them back to New Zealanders. And we love working with APO – such a forward-looking, ambitious orchestra with an incredibly wide range of music presentation.”
Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
RNZ Concert’s partnerships with New Zealand orchestras, chamber groups and soloists will continue…
Does she plan to seek additional resources for Concert to enable it to extend nationwide recording and return to specialist programme production abandoned after savage cuts five years ago? “My job is to demonstrate we’re doing the best we can with the current budget. After that will be the time to put forward ideas for additional resources.”
She thinks the 2020 increase in livestreaming will continue. “The APO pivoted to digital really quickly and we got incredible numbers on those streams where RNZ Concert provided the sound, APO provided the performance and contracted a company to do the video. I think there’s a great future for that work alongside broadcasting live.”
McMillan’s appointment as dedicated Concert Manager and “network champion” has given many people inside and outside RNZ hope that the path ahead for Concert may be smoother. Her key challenge, she says, is “to build trust, within RNZ and externally, that Concert is here to stay and that we’re going to get better. We won’t be doing anything extreme; I’m not foreseeing huge changes, though there may be some programming changes.”
Like her RNZ bosses she’s keen to grow audience numbers. “We know that 20% of New Zealanders have some interest in classical music – and we’re currently reaching about 5%. There’s nothing wrong with making things attractive and accessible and welcoming. I resent the idea that that’s ‘dumbing down’. I want to deliver excellence and allow more people to enjoy what Concert has to offer. All arts organisations have objectives to grow and diversify their audiences and if we grow the Concert audience that’s good for the whole sector.”
This article was commissioned by Phil News, the Auckland Philharmonia’s quarterly magazine. You can read more articles published by the APO here or find more news about the Orchestra on the APO’s Facebook page .