Anna Lapwood Rebuilds Film Scores for Nidaros Cathedral Organ

Anna Lapwood's new album opens with a prologue she had to steal by ear. Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, released November 13, 2026 on Sony Music Masterworks, is the organist's ninth recording and her most ambitious: a 14-movement Lord of the Rings Organ Symphony transcribed entirely from Howard Shore's film scores without a printed score to work from, recorded on the Steinmeyer organ of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway. A concert film of the performance premieres November 14 at noon Eastern.

The instrument is half the story. The Nidaros Steinmeyer was built in 1930 and restored and rebuilt in 2013, and it carries 129 stops, which is the organ's working vocabulary of distinct sounds. Film scores are written for orchestras of a hundred players; one organist at one console has to become the strings, the brass and the choir with stops, manuals and pedals. Lapwood also sings on the record. The first two tracks, Prologue: One Ring to Rule Them All and The Shire/Concerning Hobbits, were released September 11 and feature her singing in Elvish.

She isn't alone everywhere. On Rivendell and on the standalone Song for Justice, she's joined by the Nidaros Cathedral Girls' Choir, conducted by Johanna Bjørkhaug. The rest of the album widens the film shelf: a four-movement Suite from Pirates of the Caribbean built from Hans Zimmer's score, and music from How to Train Your Dragon by John Powell. The programming is deliberate. These are the scores a generation learned by heart in cinemas, moved into a building that was raising stone arches centuries before film existed.

The project started, by Lapwood's account, with a chance encounter in a New York coffee shop, where a young girl named Katherine asked her for Concerning Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. That request became an organ arrangement, the arrangement became a symphony, and the symphony became this album. It's the same route Lapwood has taken to her audience all along: she was Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 2016 to 2025, and built a following in the millions by treating the organ as an instrument for the music people already love, not a museum piece.

The concert film is built as an event rather than a permanent upload. Anna Lapwood at Nidaros premieres at 12 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, November 14, stays available for approximately 48 hours, and costs $17.94 plus a transaction fee through the Kiswe platform, with Lapwood joining the live chat during the premiere. The film uses a light show designed around the music's motivic development, light doing in the cathedral what a camera close-up does in a concert hall.

Transcription by ear is the detail that separates this from a novelty crossover record. Shore's score is dense, leitmotif-driven orchestral writing; rebuilding it for one instrument means deciding, bar by bar, what the organ can honestly say. Reviews so far have treated the result as a real organ symphony rather than a stunt. For two days, the film lets anyone with eighteen dollars hear what she decided, in the room where she decided it.