Source : the age
To understand what has drawn 4 million social media followers to superstar organist Anna Lapwood, check out a short video of her playing to a sold-out audience at London’s Royal Albert Hall in June last year.
It was a gig with Ministry of Sound, mashing up EDM classics with, among others, Bach. The delirious reception the elfin Lapwood receives when she bounces up on to the organ bench is remarkable enough but what makes the clip so special is the unalloyed joy radiating from the British musician. As she plays the familiar opening chords from Bach’s epic Toccata and Fugue in D Minor the grin spreading across her face is irresistible. She almost literally can’t contain herself.
It’s that authenticity and sheer glee that has made Lapwood perhaps the best-known classical musician of her generation. And she has done all that by the age of just 31, playing one of the oldest and grandest instruments in the western tradition. And one which is not exactly known for being fun.
It’s all so … well … unlikely.
In person, Lapwood is exactly as one would expect from her social media presence – effervescent, passionate and quick to laugh, but also thoughtful about her mission to bring new audiences into concert halls.
She bounces into the Green Room of the Sydney Opera House, wearing one of her trademark sequinned jackets, having just finished a schools special with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The program included bangers such as Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Bach Toccata and Fugue, finishing with the fourth movement of Camille Saint-Saens’ Symphony No 3.
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll know the Saint-Saens as the theme from the movie Babe, although Lapwood says she didn’t bother mentioning that to her audience. “They’re too young,” she says, of the movie that was released nearly 20 years before even she was born. She just lets the music do the work. Later, she posts a video of herself being mobbed by a crowd of primary school children, eager to high-five their hero.
Lapwood grew up in Oxford, where her early musical tastes were strongly influenced by her clergyman father.
“I spent a lot of time in churches growing up because of my dad, but also he was very creative with his listening choices,” she says. “He loved kind of Vanessa-Mae, Aled Jones, Libera, Einaudi, and film music. And so I listened to a lot of classical adjacent music as well as classical at a very young age.”
It was in church that Lapwood first experienced the raw emotional impact music can have.
“That was when I started to realise the power music has to create these really strong emotional responses and these moments of collective effervescence,” she says.
Later, when she became the first woman and youngest ever director of music – she was just 21 – at 670-year Pembroke College, Cambridge, she recalls being swept away by the beauty of the chapel choir.
“You’d be standing there conducting a hymn you’d heard a million times but when you hear everyone just absolutely singing their hearts out and the descant over the top, it’s one of the most intense emotional experiences,” she says, then pauses for a moment to gather herself. “I get emotional even just talking about it.”
When I suggest she might be considered a little “nerdy”, she owns the label with enthusiasm.
“I’m a total nerd – 100 per cent! I think nerdiness is really fun. Nerdiness is just being excited about things. Take Lord of the Rings. I’m obsessed with it. I’m a nerd about it and that’s cool.“
As a teenager, Lapwood excelled at the orchestral harp before switching to the organ. Initially, she found it tough, but she persisted and her love of film music eventually unlocked the instrument for her.
“That was my music of my childhood,” she says. “My favourite thing to do as a kid was to sit at the piano and write transcriptions of film scores. I love the organ so much more now through the film transcriptions. And I feel like I have come to the instrument now on my own terms.”
She insists her phenomenal success on social media – she has 1.5m followers each on Instagram and TikTok and almost a million on Facebook – was never part of a grand plan. She just began posting behind-the-scenes clips of her world (video of her late-night practice sessions at the Royal Albert Hall, where she is official organist, are a fan favourite) and her enthusiasm did the rest.
“All I want to do it share the unique experiences I get to have that people probably aren’t aware of,” she says. “Social media has a really interesting role to play. It’s a way of continuing the connection between concerts. I can post little snippets of the [Maurice] Duruflé [piece she is playing] or whatever and say, ‘This is why I really love this specific section and here’s what to listen out for’.
“It’s nonsense to say young people aren’t interested in classical music. They utterly are but they listen in a different way. They listen quite randomly and if they like something it goes on their playlist and they listen to it again and find more like it. It’s the most exciting time for classical music because they are waiting to be captured by our worlds.”
Anna Lapwood plays the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House on March 22 and March 28.
