Artists biographies
Iveta Apkalna

The brilliant young Latvian organist Iveta Apkalna combines profound musicality and impeccable technique very happily with a sure sense of the effect of the music. Thus in recent years she has done more than almost any other artist to liberate the organ from its dusty image. Iveta Apkalna has succeeded in becoming a star, something normally reserved in the classical-music world only for conductors, singers, pianists and violinists. She has managed to do this with her joie de vivre, her seriousness, her meticulousness and her cheerful waywardness, which has nothing to do with vanity, but above all with her outstanding mastery of the organ, often regarded as the “queen of instruments”.

Iveta Apkalna was born in Rezekne in Latvia, and studied the piano (Prof. Bikis) and organ (Prof. Deksnis) at the Riga Conservatoire. After graduating on both instruments with distinction, she took another exam at the London Guildhall School of Music and Drama under the pianist Prof. Joan Havill. From 2000 to 2003, with a grant from the DAAD Iveta Apkalna was a soloist organ student under Prof. Lohmann at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart.

Iveta Apkalna has received awards in a number of international competitions. In 2005 she won the ECHO-Klassik Prize as “Instrumentalist of the Year”, the first time an organist had achieved this distinction. In 2008 she won the ECHO-Klassik Prize a second time, in the section “Classical Music without Borders”, for the production “Noema” with David Orlowsky’s ensemble Klezmorim.

Today she performs worldwide and gives the organ a glitz which it has never had except in church. She has appeared in all the major concert halls, at leading festivals and with well-known orchestras under world-class conductors.