Anna Lapwood and the RCO’s Play the Organ Year 2025
Huw Morgan
A seven-year-old asks Anna Lapwood for advice on playing the organ
Anna Lapwood MBE is an international concert organist and Director of Music at Pembroke College Cambridge. She is Patron of Play the Organ Year 2025, the Royal College of Organists’ year-long initiative to encourage more people to encounter the organ both as players and listeners. Arwen is a Year 3 pupil at school in Bristol, where she sings in several choirs and is learning the violin.
Arwen: How old were you when you first started to play the organ?
AL: Oh, I’m always quite bad at answering this question, because I can never remember! I think I was about 14 or 15, before that I was studying at the Junior Royal Academy of Music, mostly playing the harp (I wanted to be a professional harpist). I also played the violin, piano, sang, and loved trying out other instruments, too. One day, my mum said to me, “have you ever thought about playing the organ?” I was a bit of a teenager at this time, and thought, “don’t be ridiculous, Mum, the organ is a stupid instrument!”.
But she said that if I got an organ scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, the organ scholars there get a grand piano in their room – this was a very exciting thought, and so I took up the organ so I could get a grand piano! As time went by, though, I fell in love with the instrument and its world: a whole new universe had been unlocked, and now I do it for my whole job, which is surreal and good fun.
