Anna Lapwood plays bewitching ‘Interstellar’ on 9,999-pipe Royal Albert Hall organ

30 July 2025, 17:01

Anna Lapwood - Hans Zimmer 'Interstellar' LIVE | Classic FM

The Internet’s favourite organist was playing as part of Classic FM Live at the Movies.

Hans Zimmer is one of history’s greatest film composers, and wrote one of the best-known film scores of all time: Interstellar. It was apt, then, that at Classic FM Live at the Movies, one of this generation’s most celebrated organists took to the Royal Albert Hall stage to play a suite from the score.

Anna Lapwood – the outgoing Director of Music at Pembroke College Cambridge and now the first official organist of the Royal Albert Hall – performed alongside the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Anthony Gabriele.

After the simple keyboard opening, the Liverpool Philharmonic joins the pianist and, following a moment of stillness, Lapwood joins the orchestra with her organ entrance. Together, they play two excerpts from the score, with some particularly spectacular moments for the brass, ending with a dramatic build to the final moment, where the piece ends suddenly.

Read more: Who is Anna Lapwood? The trailblazing organist

Zimmer composed this extraordinary score after reading just a single page of Christopher Nolan script and not knowing the genre of the film. All he read was one interaction between a father and child. He then recorded the original soundtrack at London’s Temple Church on the 1926 Harrison & Harrison organ with the church’s organist, Roger Sayer.

The German composer moved to delay the soundtrack album’s release until two weeks after the film premiere because he wanted audiences to hear the score in cinemas first.

In an interview, he said: “We wanted people to really hear it for the first time with the movie on really big speakers in a theatre... I just didn’t want people to go and hear everything on tiny little speakers on their Mac or something like this. I wanted them to go and have the visceral experience of being pinned in their seats.”

Read more: Hans Zimmer’s 10 best film scores – ranked from good to Interstellar

The score was nominated for an Academy Award and Original Score at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards.

Lapwood was announced as the first official organist of the Royal Albert Hall earlier this year, meaning she will headline auditorium concerts and make guest appearances with artists appearing at the Hall. She is also going to hold open sessions at the Hall to increase accessibility to organ learning, and will appoint and support their first ever Organ Scholar.

Read more: Anna Lapwood thunders out Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony on 9,999-pipe Royal Albert Hall organ

Harper’s Bazaar described Lapwood as “classical music’s Taylor Swift” and she was named on the Sunday Times’ Young Power List, celebrating the most powerful 30 people under 30 in the UK.

The first ever Classic FM Live at the Movies with Viking in April followed the launch of our new sister station Classic FM Movies, which plays the world’s greatest film music.