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.
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