Anna Lapwood: The Taylor Swift of classical music

2023-11-20 13:30:28

If you pass the Royal Albert Hall at night – around two o’clock perhaps, the stars over Hyde Park around the corner are really struggling to combat London’s lamp smog – it could be that there is still light there. And you hear a roar, a muffled noise from 10,000 whistles. And maybe a pretty loud laugh during the breaks.

This doesn’t come from a ghost. This comes from a rather petite blonde woman with a pigtail and relatively huge glasses, who is in the process of turning everything that is normal about ordinary organ playing on its head.

Her name is Anna Lapwood. She is 28 years old. And what she does on the heavy instrument (nickname: “The Voice of Jupiter”) with 129 registers and four manuals, which has been standing at the head of the huge hall since it opened, she does regularly between midnight and six in the morning, because she can really be as loud as she likes.

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And you can see it on TikTok. And on X. And on Facebook. And everywhere on all the supposed social media. Anna Lapwood has more than half a million followers on TikTok alone. She has been called the most public organist in the world and the Taylor Swift of classical music. You have to try pretty hard to find superlatives that haven’t been invented for them yet.

But one after anonther. Anna Lapwood comes from Buckinghamshire, more precisely from High Wicombe, for whose church All Saints Henry Willis III. In 1930 he built one of the most beautiful organs in southern England. The grandson of the organ builder whose masterpiece has filled the Royal Albert Hall with music since it was opened by Queen Victoria in 1871. Anna’s father was prior of the parish church and in a previous life had once played the violin under Benjamin Britten.

Anna sat at an organ for the first time when she was 15. She then said of herself with youthful carelessness, which she later somewhat regretted, that she knew how to play twenty instruments (violin, various recorders, harp, among others). With the harp she made it into the National Youth Orchestra of the United Kingdom.

She was just tired of it

The organ, however, became her destiny. Because the organ, says Anna Lapwood, is like a good punch in the stomach. And maybe because Anna Lapwood was tired of it.

That you only come across the organ when you marry someone or bury them (apart from Christmas). That, she once said, if you ask a child what they think of when they think of an organ, they think of an old white, white-haired man in an event in which they were terribly bored. Hardly anyone sees what else is going on with this instrumental tripple boom other than chorale preludes and Bach and Buxtehude.

And the fact that only eight percent of organist positions are filled by women means that it took centuries for women to even come close to titular organist positions like in Versailles (Alexandra Bartfeld) or in the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie (Iveta Apkalna).

Anna Lapwood plays Debussy

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The final straw was the fact that the judge of a competition – you have to imagine Anna Lapwood as a pretty defiant musician – once told her that everything she was playing was really nice, but that she should play a little more like a man to overflow.

But probably no one could stop Anna Lapwood at that time. She was a three-stage rocket into the future of her instrument. She just didn’t know it yet. She became the first female organ scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 560 years. She then became the first female professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge (founded 1346). And of course she wasn’t satisfied with organ lessons. Anna Lapwood founded a girls’ choir. And she also goes to Zambia once a year. To support female musicians. And to look at the stars. But more on that later.

The thing with the girls’ choir in Pembroke had consequences. Two of her singers came to her at some point and asked how active she was on social media and said that she and her way of conveying classical music would be ideal for TikTok. And then it started.

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Anna Lapwood – who had already founded a Bachathlon in Pembroke, a 24-hour marathon in which as many sections of Bach’s complete works as possible were mastered – started the hashtag #playitlikeagirl as revenge on her juror. And the most successful organ popularization hashtag #organtok. And started posting her night sessions at the Royal Albert Hall on TikTok. Anna Lapwood became a public organist. And whatever she set went through the roof.

For example, once she sat at the public organ at London Bridge underground station (it really exists, anyone can play music on it, it should be on every subway). She wanted to make some music for the Queen. A black Metro security worker – who later turned out to have had singing training – stood there in her full yellow and dark blue security officer regalia. And then they started with Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” from “Rinaldo.” The aria touched the heart and went viral.

And then she played at the opening of the Bafta Awards, the most important British film prize. And then one night she was playing at the Royal Albert Hall and a sound engineer from British DJ and musician Bonobo was listening to her. Bonobo filled the hall’s 8,000 seats for five evenings. Less than a day later they performed Bonobo’s “Otomo” together and Anna Lapwood’s social media numbers finally went through the roof.

Anna Lapwood und Benedict Cumberland in der Royal Albert Hall

Quelle: Andy Paradise/Paradise Photo

And at some point the wonderful friendship with Benedict Cumberbatch began in the Royal Albert Hall. “Sherlock” read in the now legendary “Letters” series at the Albert Hall (celebrities read through the history of British letters) and at one point asked Anna Lapwood to do so.

She in turn asked Cumberbatch to play the organ. They had fun, some wonderful pictures were taken, the pictures went viral. He is said to have played a bit of Bach, she explained on Words for penguin).

Anna Lapwood mit DJ Bonobos “Otomo”

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And because of course no social media phenomenon is left without a record contract, Anna Lapwood got one from Sony. And “Luna” is the name of her first album. Recorded on the William Hill organ of the Royal Hospital School in Holbrook (reverberation: eight seconds). A look at the night sky, in which stars hang that are actually impossible because they look kitschy.

Bach’s C major Prelude in the horrific “Ave Maria” version by Gounod, Debussy’s horrific “Claire de Lune”, Max Richter’s horrific “On Nature of Daylight” and twelve other horrors that Anna Lapwood herself arranged for organ and in transformed into something completely wonderful, almost star-like.

Her TikTok community was not uninvolved in the selection; they really wanted Ludovico Einaudi’s “Experience” and Hans Zimmer’s film music for “Interstellar”. Everything is nice and everything is nice and slow (because of the reverberation). Anna Lapwood takes the horror out of the horror. And hopefully inspire many more girls to sing the voice of Jupiter.