Anna Lapwood Will Premiere Max Richter Organ Commission At Royal Albert Hall Headline Show

Classical music sensation Anna Lapwood will premiere a new organ commission written for her by post-minimalist superstar Max Richter when she headlines the Royal Albert Hall in May.

Lapwood has been widely credited with popularising the classical organ, having performed alongside pop artists like RAYE, AURORA and Florence and the Machine, and introduced stars including Tom Cruise and Benedict Cumberbatch to the delights of the instrument, amassing 870,000 TikTok followers in the process.

In the past year, the Royal Albert Hall Associate Artist has sold out performances with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano, and performed major recitals at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles and Boardwalk Hall, New Jersey. Now she returns to the Hall for her first headline show there in two years.

Lapwood said: “I am so excited to be able to announce these two new commissions from Max Richter and Kristina Arakelyan, both made possible by the Royal Albert Hall. I feel really strongly about placing the organ at the heart of the classical world instead of on the periphery, and commissioning more music for organ and orchestra lies at the heart of this. I've loved Max's music for many years and so I'm particularly excited that he has agreed to write a new work for me, helping to celebrate the incredible organ of the Royal Albert Hall in performance with orchestra and chorus. I'm particularly keen to encourage more women to write for the instrument - I think the historic gender imbalances in the organ world also extend to the music written for the instrument - and so I'm thrilled that Kristina has agreed to write this new work. She's a composer I have worked with many times and whose writing I find equal parts moving and exhilarating.”

Max Richter said: “I’m so happy to have written this new work for Anna, one of the brightest lights of the contemporary classical scene. Composing the piece has been a wonderful and fascinating challenge; a process of discovering the outer limits of sonic and physical space. I hope that hearing this concerto on that legendary organ, in one of the world’s great venues, will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the audience.”

Lapwood’s Royal Albert Hall concert will include two new commissions: the Richter work, featuring the Philharmonic Orchestra and Philharmonic Chorus conducted by André de Ridder, and an orchestral composition by rising star Kristina Arakelyan. The programme will also feature Lapwood’s performances of Hans Zimmer’s ‘Chevaliers de Sangreal’ and ‘Interstellar Suite’ and Camille Saint Saëns’ ‘Symphony No. 3’.

Matthew Todd, Director of Programming at the Hall, said: “Anna is nothing short of a phenomenon: a uniquely talented artist who through her passion and musicality has breathed new life into organ music. It’s been a pleasure for us to work with her as an associate artist over the past two years, and we’re so excited to present this major headline show.”

Lapwood made her debut for the BBC Proms as a soloist in Saint-Saëns ‘Organ Symphony’ with the Hallé conducted by Sir Mark Elder in 2021, before giving her Proms recital debut with her programme ‘Moon and Stars’ in 2023. Last year, she was also awarded the prestigious ‘Gamechanger’ Award by the Royal Philharmonic Society, and signed to Sony Classical as an exclusive recording artist, releasing an EP (‘Midnight Sessions at the Royal Albert Hall’) and album (‘Luna’). In January this year, she was made an MBE, and this month received an Opus Klassik Award for ‘Luna’. She has recently made headline news after appearing on Greg James’s BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show, playing the Royal Albert Hall organ in a memorial service for a tragic, unusually tall duck named Long Boi.

In addition to this headline show on Thursday 15 May 2025, Lapwood will be performing at the Hall at Sandi Toksvig’s Christmas show (18 December 2024) and Women of the World’s 15th anniversary event (8 March 2025).

Max Richter’s organ composition is a co-commission by the Royal Albert Hall, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Hallé, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra (US).

Tickets for Anna Lapwood at the Royal Albert Hall, priced from £25, are available from Friday at 10am from www.royalalberthall.com. A pre-sale for the venue’s Friends and Patrons begins 24 hours earlier.

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