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 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, 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 Disney film score, is a great way to attract new audiences to the organ.’
Anna Lapwood on TikTok
But not the only way – which brings us to the second ‘game-changing’ thing I knew about Lapwood before meeting her. She has become known – whether as a compliment or, possibly, a slightly sniffy putdown – as ‘the TikTok organist’. It’s an epithet that Lapwood welcomes without any misgivings at all. Indeed, around the time that we met she tweeted an extraordinary statistic: that she had just acquired her 500,000th follower on TikTok. In fact, the figure is now 700,700, and she has also notched up a jaw-dropping 21.6 million ‘likes’ for the music she posts there.
‘People in classical music are always asking how they can reach a wider audience,’ she says. ‘The bizarrely simple answer is social media. It genuinely works. I saw a statistic recently saying that young people are spending on average six hours a day on TikTok and other social media. That may seem horrific, but if it’s true we had better make sure they are seeing classical music there for at least some of the time. We need to make ourselves relevant.’
Which she has certainly done. But do all those TikTok followers convert into posteriors on seats at Lapwood’s concerts? ‘Yes, they really do,’ she replies. ‘They hear me play film music on TikTok, then they come to a recital and hear me play something more serious, such as the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes, and they enjoy it because, actually, it sounds just like film music.’
What other instruments does Anna Lapwood play?
What’s indisputable is that, in just a few years, Lapwood has become one of the most famous organists in the world – in the same league as American superstars such as the late Carlo Curley and the current ‘crossover’ sensation Cameron Carpenter. And, remarkably, the organ isn’t even her first instrument. Growing up in Oxford, she started learning piano at the age of four. ‘But my older brother was learning different instruments at school, and I would watch him practise and beg my parents for lessons,’ she recalls. ‘That happened with about seven different instruments. That’s when I also started to transfer music between different instruments. I would take a piece I was scratching away at on the violin and play it on the piano to see how it sounded and how I could harmonise it.’
At primary school, however, true love hit her. ‘We had this amazing harp teacher at the school, and she inspired so many of us to play these little folk harps. We even had a harp orchestra. I got very serious about it. Soon I was studying harp at Junior Academy [the Saturday classes for talented schoolchildren at the Royal Academy of Music]. Then I became principal harpist with the National Youth Orchestra.’
By her mid-teens, Lapwood says, she was ‘totally set’ on becoming a professional harpist in a symphony orchestra. ‘My parents even sent me to do work experience in a harp shop! I told them it was a terrible idea. I knew I would fall in love with one of the instruments there. And I did. At least I got a hefty discount on it.’
So, when did the organ first intrude on her life? ‘When I was about 14,’ she replies. ‘My father was the chaplain in a boys’ prep school and we lived on site, so I basically grew up around churches and chapels. One day my mother said to me: “Why don’t you take up the organ? You know, if you get into Oxford or Cambridge, the organ scholars get grand pianos in their rooms.”’
Is the organ difficult to play?
The carrot worked, but Lapwood found she wasn’t a natural. ‘The organ was the hardest instrument I had ever tried to play, and I really didn’t like it at first. It was that classic problem of left hand and pedal – trying to sever the link in your brain that says the left hand is the bass, when suddenly it’s the middle part. You sit there thinking, “Why are my limbs not doing what I want?” But in a way I’m glad I went through that stage, because now I can say to young players, “Persevere, because there will be a eureka moment when the wiring in your head starts to adapt.”’
It adapted in Lapwood’s head so well that, three years later, she won an organ scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. That, however, presented her with yet another steep learning curve. ‘It was a real baptism of fire. I had never accompanied a choir on the organ before I turned up, never played for psalms, and here I was expected to do eight services a week. In my first term it was like living in a foreign country and not speaking the language. I even got as far as writing a resignation letter.
‘But then I had a long chat with myself. I decided I was going to practise eight hours a day and see if I got better. After that I started to enjoy myself. But I kept on doing six to eight hours daily practice through my three years there, and didn’t sleep much. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.’
From organ loft to choir stalls: how Anna Lapwood became the youngest music director at an Oxbridge college
Lapwood graduated at Oxford, only to be plunged in at the deep end again at ‘the other place’. At the age of 21 she was appointed to run the music – including the chapel choir – at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Some of the students in the choir were older than she was. ‘I had to learn quickly what didn’t work, which was standing at the front and getting cross,’ she laughs. ‘At Magdalen I had been working with a choir of sort-of professionals. At Pembroke it’s different. They are volunteers. The attitude at first was, “If we’re late for rehearsals, what are you going to do?” I had to make them want to be there.’
She also instigated two crucial innovations. The first was to start a girls’ choir, for 11- to 18-year-olds. ‘There are 16 of them now, and they can sing in eight-part harmony. They love that: the responsibility of holding their own line.’
‘I learned quickly that what doesn’t work is standing at the front and getting cross’
The other was to schedule a piece of music by a woman composer in every service for a whole year. ‘The result was that by the end of that period we had built up a core repertoire of choral music by women composers that the congregation and the choir loved. It was liberating. Now the split between male and female composers is 50/50, and it’s not a big issue anymore.’
Lapwood's campaign for women composers
Both initiatives spring from Lapwood’s fervent desire to promote women in classical music generally, and the choral and organ world particularly. ‘We aren’t at anything like parity yet,’ she says. ‘The percentage of women doing organ recitals is still pitifully small – around ten per cent. And the percentage directing the music in cathedrals is even smaller.’
That’s one issue she has turned into a campaign. The other is indignation at the cuts imposed on classical music in the past year by Arts Council England and other leading funding organisations. ‘We are in a fight now, and everyone in the classical music world has to be ready to stand up for what we believe in,’ she declares. ‘The decisions being made seem based on very ignorant stereotypes of what classical music is, and what the groups facing cuts have been doing, which is often to be at the forefront of encouraging diversity and taking music to a wider public.’
‘The percentage of women doing organ recitals is still pitifully small’
Is classical music elitist – and is that a problem?
Isn’t one main problem the accusation that classical music is ‘elitist’? ‘But in sport the word “elite” is not seen as having a negative connotation,’ Lapwood replies. ‘Quite the opposite. It’s seen as an aspiration, something that people are proud of. Elite musicians have worked really hard to get where they are. They will be the people inspiring the next generation to take up music – but not if they are being squeezed so much that they can’t make music anymore.’
Lapwood isn’t going to stop campaigning on this issue, even if it does feel like banging her head against the proverbial brick wall. ‘I spoke about this recently to an all-party parliamentary group on music education, and found everyone in the room was in agreement,’ she says. ‘But the real challenge is to reach those who weren’t in the room, and make them listen.’
