Anna Lapwood

Anna Lapwood stands among the small number of women occupying top-tier positions in global organ performance, a distinction she highlights through the social media hashtag #playlikeagirl. She maintains a parallel career as a choral conductor in her role as Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge University.

Born on July 28, 1995, in England’s Hertfordshire region, Lapwood demonstrated prodigious talent early, mastering 20 instruments—including the harp—by age 11, though she first approached the organ only at 16. Her training encompassed piano, violin, viola, and composition at the Junior Royal Academy of Music, while she performed on harp with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Such swift advancement on the organ enabled her to underwrite her Oxford University studies at Magdalen College through an Organ Scholarship, a post she became the first woman to occupy across the institution’s 560-year existence. Upon earning first-class honors, she joined Pembroke College, Cambridge, at age 21—the youngest person ever appointed director of music at any Oxford or Cambridge college.

There she leads the Chapel Choir and, in 2018, founded the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir, which has undertaken tours (including workshops she directed in Zambia) and produced recordings. She also launched the Cambridge Organ Experience for Girls at Pembroke and inaugurated an annual Bach-a-thon concert series whose proceeds support the college’s ensembles.

Amid these commitments, Lapwood has presented solo recitals and toured throughout Britain, the United States, and continental Europe at venues including the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall—where she performed the organ for the annual televised BAFTA Awards—and St. Thomas Church in New York. She further hosts a weekly classical music program on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and has appeared on BBC Radio 3.

Lapwood’s organ work includes several credits; in 2020 she directed the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir on the album All Things Are Quite Silent, which incorporates her own composition O Nata Lux. Signed to the Signum Classics label, she issued her debut album, Images, in 2021. That September she performed Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78 (“Organ Symphony”) with the Hallé Orchestra at the BBC Proms and subsequently with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.