Anna Lapwood MBE is a British organist, choir director and television and radio presenter, whose recordings have reached a wide audience on social media since she was appointed as an associate artist at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2022. Lapwood was born in 1995 at High Wycombe. Her father is an Anglican clergyman and teacher, her mother is a paediatric palliative carer. She studied piano, violin, viola and composition at the Junior Royal Academy of Music and was the principal harpist for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the Junior Academy Symphony Orchestra. She can play 15 instruments. After attending Oxford High School, where she played four instruments to grade 8 standard and began playing the organ, Lapwood gained a first-class degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, and was the first woman in the college’s 560-year history to be awarded an organ scholarship.
Lapwood was appointed as Director of Music of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 2016. On appointment she was the youngest person to hold the position of Director of Music at an Oxford or Cambridge university college, taking up the position at the age of 21. As Director of Music, she conducts the chapel choir, and in 2020 she became the youngest Bye-Fellow in the College’s history. In 2018, Lapwood founded the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir for girls from local schools aged 11–18, which performs Evensong weekly during term time. She also runs the Cambridge Organ Experience for Girls every year. She inaugurated the annual Pembroke College Bach-a-thon in 2017, initially to raise funds for Pembroke College Choir’s tour to Zambia. In 2018, all of the organists taking part in the Bach-a-thon were female. In 2019, Lapwood established another choir at Pembroke College, designed to teach sight-reading skills to singers. It was announced in February 2025 that Lapwood will leave her position at Pembroke College at the end of the 2024−2025 academic year, to pursue her career as a concert organist.
In May 2022, Lapwood was unexpectedly invited to play with the electronic artist Bonobo and his band on their fifth and final night at the Royal Albert Hall. After band members overheard Lapwood rehearsing on the Hall’s main organ in the early hours of the morning, the band asked her to join their performance the next day. Eighteen hours later, an organ part had been written especially for Lapwood to accompany Bonobo for the closing show, with an audience of 5,000. The video of the performance became popular on social media platforms, registering more than 5.6 million views on Lapwood’s TikTok account. Lapwood later called the experience “genuinely life-changing” and “undoubtedly, the best moment of my life so far”. She later played the Hall’s organ for 2023 shows by the Ministry of Sound and Raye, and a 2024 live performance by Aurora.
In September 2022, Lapwood played the newly installed pipe organ at London Bridge station, popularly known as “Henry”, with her performance of “God Save the King”, accompanied by a security guard, going viral on Twitter. Lapwood was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to music.[In 2025, she was named the inaugural official organist of the Royal Albert Hall.
As a broadcaster, Lapwood hosted a weekly classical music show on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire from 2018 to 2020, and is a contributor to BBC Radio 3, having appeared on Record Review with Andrew McGregor. Because of her popularity on social media, she has occasionally been referred to as the “TikTok Organist” and uses the hashtag #playlikeagirl. Lapwood was the main presenter of the televised highlights of the 2020 BBC Young Musician competition, which aired in 2021 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Lapwood has since been seen as a regular TV presenter of the BBC Proms, including presenting the live broadcast of the 2023 first night of the Proms alongside Sandi Toksvig and Clive Myrie. Anna also played the Organ as part of the 2024 Doctor Who Proms during the show’s second half.
