Anna Lapwood

Anna Lapwood has given organ music a major boost with her viral TikTok videos and unlikely but brilliant transcriptions for the instrument. The multi-talented British artist, who is soon to turn 30, recently stepped down as music director at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to concentrate on her solo career. Her new album, Firedove, is out on Sony Classical on 30 May.

- Michael Beek

I came to the organ quite late, and I didn’t fall in love with it for a long time. There's a chunk of my life, from about 15-18, that was all about orchestral music; I was playing harp in the National Youth Orchestra and in the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra. I remember an activation in my brain around that time with things like Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture, BRITTEN's Four Sea Interludes - I'll never forget playing them for the first time - and Shostakovich's Fifth with that amazing harp solo at the end of the slow movement. I thought I was going to become an orchestral harpist; then I found the organ. I wrote a transcription of the Four Sea Interludes for organ during the first Covid lockdown. It was a big moment, because it was the first time I'd really explored playing music that I wanted to play for my own sake, as opposed to music I was being told to play.