<\/p>
The evening before I interviewed Anna Lapwood<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 in her room at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where The first had been a few days earlier, when I walked into the chapel of the Royal Hospital School (a venerable independent school with naval connections on the banks of the River Stour in Suffolk) to be greeted by a roar of sound. It was a huge pipe organ blasting out what sounded like hundreds of notes a second at a decibel level that must have made strong trees quiver for miles around.<\/p> What was being played, however, was not a Bach<\/a><\/strong> fugue or some other evergreen from the traditional organ repertoire. It was a theme from a Disney movie, dressed up virtuosically like one of those flamboyant toccatas by Widor<\/a><\/strong> or Vierne.<\/p> No sooner had I recovered from this culture shock, however, than the figure up in the organ loft launched into something equally familiar yet also strangely different: Chopin<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Nocturne<\/a><\/strong> in E flat for piano, but again transformed so it wafted across the chapel cloaked in flute and string sounds, with the pedal notes as rhythmic as a jazz pizzicato bass.<\/p>