Anna Lapwood: Luna
Sony Classical

It was during a teaching stint in Zambia that the idea for Luna came to organist Anna Lapwood. Gazing upon the night sky, she was so struck by the stars that filled it, the notion of fashioning a recording around the concept quickly took hold. While its fifteen pieces are united by that connection, the recording would be as rewarding even if no such concept tied the material together. Film music transcriptions are joined by pieces from the classical repertoire on a smartly sequenced programme that couples music by Glass, Ešenvalds, and others with earlier works by Bach, Chopin, Debussy, and Florence Beatrice Price. Film composers are well-represented, with material by James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer, and Dario Marianelli in the set-list. Luna is obviously a feast for organ lovers, but Lapwood also shows another side of herself in conducting the Pembroke College Chapel Choir on two selections.

Playing an organ at the Royal Hospital School chapel, she opens the album with the overture-like “Flying,” a soaring piece from Howard 2003's live-action film Peter Pan whose thick chords convey the grandeur of which the site's organ is capable. Hushed by comparison is her moving rendition of Olivia Belli's “Grain Moon,” originally scored for piano, violin, and cello and taken from her album Sol Novo. Having transposed the original's rippling piano and violin pizzicato to the organ, Lapwood's version mesmerizes with gentle, glistening textures and warmth. Throughout the album, the instrument's incredible range of timbres enables it to function like a mini-orchestra.

One of the challenges involved in transposing from piano to organ, writes Lapwood, is the absence of a sustain pedal on her instrument, but, as her thoroughly attractive treatment of Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9, No.2 shows, the acoustic resonance of the RHS chapel provides a credible equivalent. That allows her to think about “not just playing the organ but playing the building,” in her words. As soothing are her renderings of Johann Sebastian Bach and Charles Gounod's Ave Maria, Debussy's Clair de Lune, and Ghislaine Reece-Trapp's In Paradisum, the latter inspired by the plainsong melody of the same title that's typically sung at the end of the requiem mass.

Lapwood aptly states of Marianelli's “Dawn” (from Pride and Prejudice), “If music were colour, this piece would be the green grass in the morning sunlight, still fresh with dew from the night before.” Certainly the wonderland of colour she coaxes from the organ evokes that spirits-lifting impression. With its gleaming timbres, the organ likewise lends itself well to evocations of magic and wonder, with Florence Beatrice Price's charming An Elf on a Moonbeam a prime illustration of that capability.

Unlike most of the pieces on the release, Zimmer's “Stay” (from Interstellar) undertakes a gradual build, in this case swelling from a minimal opening to a grandiose, senses-dazzling climax. As epic, Glass's Mad Rush has grown familiar as a piano piece but was in fact written for organ in 1978, specifically the organ of St. John the Divine, New York. Here as ever, the piece, characterized by the composer as “the play of the wrathful and peaceful dieties in Tibetan Buddhism,” engages as it oscillates between gently serenading passages and high-velocity semiquaver patterns delivered at a towering pitch.

The combination of organ and the gorgeous voices of the Pembroke College Chapel Choir produces sublime results in Eriks Ešenvalds and Sara Teasdale's Stars and Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight. Similar in elegiac tone to Richter's is Ludovico Einaudi's Experience. Two pieces by Kristina Arakelyan appear, Dreamland, a Lapwood organ transcription of a piece originally scored for soprano and piano, and Star Fantasy, a delicate meditation that progresses from the evocation of a single star coming into view at the onset of night to the awe-inspiring sight of stars filling the sky.

January 2024