Inside the nearly empty Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA last Monday afternoon, the air rumbles and judders and roars like a B-52 engine readying for takeoff.
On the hall’s bare stage, Anna Lapwood, her hands and feet in motion, works the organ’s remote console, conjuring music both delicately serene and so thunderous that it at times seems to emanate from the structure itself.
“Every concert is a duet with a different duet partner essentially, because every organ is so different,” says Lapwood after a full day of rehearsal on the hall’s massive, 6,134-piece pipe organ, known affectionately as “Hurricane Mama.” “It’s one of my favorite organs to play.”
“She’s a very warm, loving instrument. And yes, she has a bite to her, but it comes from a place of love,” Lapwood says, marveling at its power. “It’s got all that low end … It feels like we’re playing the building.”
She’ll be performing for a sold-out audience at the hall on May 3 with a program that includes music from films such as “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by composers that include Hans Zimmer, Alan Menken, John Williams and Howard Shore.
All the stops, nonstop
Lapwood, the acclaimed British musician and social media sensation, has probably done more to popularize the organ than anything since baseball’s seventh-inning stretch. The 30-year-old has an audience of more than 4 million fans across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, who are drawn to her talent, repertoire and infectious exuberance.
Despite a grueling schedule and a lack of fresh clothing after her luggage went missing while crisscrossing North America, Lapwood remained unfailingly upbeat, engaged and willing to do whatever was needed during the rehearsal, photo shoot and interview — including making a quick sprint back to her hotel once her bag finally did turn up to offer the photographer more wardrobe choices.
You get the sense she loves what she’s doing, whether performing for fans or spending hours alone registering the organ, the painstaking process of preparing the stops, sounds and voicings before each concert.
“I was in until midnight last night, and then I couldn’t sleep because I’m often wired after I finish registering,” she says, sounding genuinely cheerful about sleep deprivation. “So I was wide awake at like 2 in the morning and then back here at 9. I was like, it’ll be fine: I’ll just play the organ all day.”
“When I’m practicing, I just forget about everything else,” she says.
Lapwood was nearing the end of roughly 20 hours of preparation for her May 3 L.A. concert, which was still nearly a week away. She planned to squeeze in a few more hours in the morning before flying to Atlantic City, where she estimated she’d spend about 40 hours on registration there.“I think a lot of people assume that playing the organ is a bit like playing the piano, where you do your practice at home, but then you turn up to a venue, sit down and do a sound check, but it’s basically the same,” she says. “That is not the case at all.
“You have to set every sound of the concert, every color, every texture, every combination of stops. You have to set them all individually by yourself into the computer. And not only do you have to set them into the computer, but you also have to audition them and choose each combination of sounds,” says Lapwood, who plays through the program multiple times to catch errors, smooth transitions and check the sound in the hall. “For my concert program, it’s about 350 different settings.”
As each instrument is different, there’s another challenge, a physical one.
“You have to go through again and embed in the muscle memory, because the buttons are in different places on every organ,” she says. “So because of how the schedules have worked, I’m here for a couple of days, then going and doing another concert in Atlantic City, and then coming back and doing this concert.
“The button that I press repeatedly with my right foot in Atlantic City is up high on the right. And here it’s down low on the right,” she says, still wearing mismatched socks with her glittering organ shoes due to the luggage snafu. “My foot keeps going too high, so you have to retrain the muscle memory on every organ console.”
Even so, when you factor in the travel, the preparation and everything else, the performance is pure joy.
“Performing is the least tiring bit,” she says. “I always say that on stage I feel my freest.”
The keys to success
A multi-instrumentalist and singer, Lapwood became the first woman in Magdalen College, Oxford’s 568-year history to be awarded its organ scholarship, and at 21, she became a choir director at Cambridge’s Pembroke College, a position she held for 9 years. She was made an MBE in 2024, and she broke the news of the royal honor to her parents on TikTok. Last year, she became the Royal Albert Hall’s first-ever official organist.
As well as releasing albums and appearing on television, Lapwood’s social media appearances have often been memorable, whether performing an impromptu duet with an opera-trained security guard in a London tube station following the death of Queen Elizabeth or the 2022 viral video of her playing for thousands of fans with the electronic artist Bonobo, who’d heard Lapwood practicing at the venue and wrote a part for her to perform with the group that night.
With the positives of social media fame, there are also the downsides.
“There’s the kind of generic social media hate, which is really easy to ignore because we all know that that is just part of life … [but] it’s difficult when it comes from people in your world,” she says, referring to unkind comments from within the music community. “You get very used to deflecting, and every now and then something pierces the armor … and that’s hard.”
She credits therapy with changing her life for the better, as has her decision to play what speaks to her — rather than only perform from an accepted canon. “You have to play what is right for you as a performer,” she says. “You have to take care of yourself a little bit and be a bit selfish and play the music that speaks to you. And I’m very lucky that there’s a huge audience who also love that music, so it’s not entirely selfish.”
But Lapwood says getting people interested in the organ wasn’t always easy.
“Early on in my career, I was constantly trying to pitch shows about the organ and things like this, and I kept hearing people say, ‘Sorry, no one’s interested in the organ,’” she says. “If they aren’t interested, why not? Because it’s such a cool instrument.”
She laughs when reminded that she has said in interviews that she herself wasn’t initially the biggest organ fan as a child, but that changed when she saw one being played. “I think when you can see what’s happening, suddenly you listen in a totally different way.”
‘The Rings’ cycle
This resistance she faced led her to seek out music that spoke to her the most, which quite often were the scores of films like “Interstellar” and “The Lord of the Rings,” adapted for the organ.
“I love playing the film scores because I grew up loving that music, and I grew up sitting at the piano trying to figure out how to play all my favorite film scores. I’m now doing that for my job, and the kind of freedom I feel at the instrument when I’m playing those film scores is unlike anything else. It has totally changed my relationship with the instrument, and it keeps unlocking new little bits of creativity in my brain, which I’m forever grateful for.
“And so the fact that I then get to do that as my job and that it introduces new people to the instrument at the same time, I feel very lucky.”
The program for this concert will feature her adaptation of Howard Shore’s score for “The Lord of the Rings” films, which Lapwood says emerged when she met a young girl before a show in New York City who said her favorite piece of music was Shore’s “Concerning Hobbits” from “The Fellowship of the Ring.”
“It was her birthday, and so I said, ‘What’s your favorite piece?’ And she said, ‘Concerning Hobbits,’ and I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t actually play that, sorry, but I hope you enjoy the concert anyway,’” says Lapwood, who says she had second thoughts after leaving the coffee shop. “I ran to the church, and I quickly wrote a little arrangement for her, and I did it for her in the concert. And my brain just went, ‘Oh, hang on a minute.’
Lapwood, who says she’s loved the score since playing it in the school orchestra, knew she wanted to develop it for the organ.
“I had a massive spreadsheet, and I enlisted the help of two of my friends who are massive Lord of the Rings nerds as well. We slowly started whittling it down and creating a structure,” she says, and then, while in Germany for a concert, she felt it come together. “I asked if I could go back to the organ after my practice session had finished, and I stayed for three hours and I wrote the first movement. And then I performed that in the concert the next day, and then the next organ I went to, I wrote the next movement. Basically, it just started spinning really fast from that point.”
Lapwood says she wanted to get Shore’s blessing, especially about making minor changes to suit the instrument.
“I’ve been very lucky to work with Howard, who very kindly looked over the whole thing and offered notes and thoughts, and also very kindly gave me permission to adjust things to make it work better on the organ at times, because it’s always that balance between wanting to be really loyal to the original and wanting to make it work for the instrument,” she says.
“I cry whenever I reach the end when I get to play it in concerts, because it means so much to me,” she says. “It’s just changed my relationship with the instrument all over again.”
After reminding herself to breathe after “quite a busy bit” of playing the fall of Sauron, Lapwood gets to sing, performing the Elvish “Arwen’s Song” from the end of “The Return of the King.”
“That’s always the moment that I start crying, and it’s really hard because my voice starts to shake. But actually, I kind of love it because it feels human and it feels fragile and it feels vulnerable, and that is what that music is in my mind,” she says. “I feel like this whole project has given me permission to experiment with how I am on stage, how I perform and being vulnerable on stage, and doing things which are a bit risky and seeing how it feels.”
While it hasn’t been officially announced, Lapwood reveals her ‘Rings’ arrangement will be on her next album.
“I’ve recorded it already, and when we did the album photoshoot, I got to stay in a Hobbit house for two days,” she says, rewatching the films while staying there. “Best two days of my life.”