Anna Lapwood has built a huge fanbase through her performances of music from Bach to Disney and her enthusiastic social media presence. Richard Morrison catches up with her as she records her debut album for Sony
The evening before I interviewed Anna Lapwood – in her room at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she is director of music – she had been in London to receive an accolade called ‘Gamechanger’ at the annual Royal Philharmonic Society Awards ceremony. ‘They said it was for creating a new blueprint for classical music,’ she tells me proudly. But I didn’t really need the explanation. I had already encountered two startling examples of how this remarkable organist, still only 28, has been ‘changing the game’.
The first had been a few days earlier, when I walked into the chapel of the Royal Hospital School (a venerable independent school with naval connections on the banks of the River Stour in Suffolk) to be greeted by a roar of sound. It was a huge pipe organ blasting out what sounded like hundreds of notes a second at a decibel level that must have made strong trees quiver for miles around.
What was being played, however, was not a Bach fugue or some other evergreen from the traditional organ repertoire. It was a theme from a Disney movie, dressed up virtuosically like one of those flamboyant toccatas by Widor or Vierne.
No sooner had I recovered from this culture shock, however, than the slim blonde figure up in the organ loft launched into something equally familiar yet also strangely different: Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat for piano, but again transformed so it wafted across the chapel cloaked in flute and string sounds, with the pedal notes as rhythmic as a jazz pizzicato bass.
This was Lapwood recording her forthcoming album Luna (out on 29 September), the fruit of a new contract with Sony Classical. ‘There are only two traditional organ pieces on it,’ she says. ‘But that’s the fun of it. So many great organists out there can play the traditional organ repertoire far better than I can. What really excites me is taking a piece such as Debussy’s “Clair de lune”, which I have played on the piano for years, and thinking: “How can I make this work on the organ, and also say something different with it?”
‘It’s something I used to do all the time as a kid: sit at the piano, basically working out how to play by ear film scores I’d just heard in the cinema. My thinking now is that playing something really familiar on the organ, like a Di
