Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Former President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago Nov. 18, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida. Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel that day to oversee the Justice Department's investigation into classified documents at Mr. Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and a probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Former President Donald Trump has announced that he is running for the White House again in 2024. At the same time, he is facing the greatest legal jeopardy of his life, as the Department of Justice intensifies its investigation into the potential mishandling of secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

It is impossible to predict how long this investigation will last or whether federal prosecutors will in the end decide to take the momentous step of indicting a once and possibly future U.S. chief executive. But if they do, the next two-year cycle of American politics could be a jolting journey into unexplored territory.

Trump supporters would almost certainly blast any criminal case the DOJ were to bring against the former president as political retribution by a successor from the other party. If prosecutors pass on such action, a countervailing number of anti-Trump voters may see it as a sign that he is indeed above the law, with unknown consequences for U.S. democracy.

“That’s why it’s important that the people making these decisions have a lot of experience. The answers are going to have grave consequences for our country,” says Rebecca Roiphe, a former Manhattan prosecutor and current professor at New York Law School.

A variety of legal threats

The Mar-a-Lago case is only one of Mr. Trump’s current legal problems. Under newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith, the Justice Department continues to probe whether the former president incited an insurrection, committed election fraud, or engaged in other illegal actions in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Mr. Smith, in one of his first major actions since his appointment, on Tuesday sent grand jury subpoenas to local officials in three battleground states the Trump team tried to flip following the election: Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The subpoenas asked for any and all communication between the officials and Mr. Trump, his aides, and many Trump allies.

Peter Dejong/AP/File

Prosecutor Jack Smith waits for the start of a court session in The Hague, Netherlands, Nov. 10, 2020. Appointed last month as special counsel overseeing investigations related to former President Donald Trump, Mr. Smith has a long track record prosecuting public corruption and war crimes.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis is overseeing a special grand jury that is weighing whether Mr. Trump and his allies broke state law in pushing to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory there.

And this week the Manhattan District Attorney’s office wrapped up its prosecution of the Trump Organization on 17 felony counts of tax fraud with convictions across the board.

Mr. Trump was not personally charged in the case, which accused the firm of dodging taxes by lavishing executives with unreported perks. Potential fines are about $1.6 million, a small slap for the organization. But the Trump name has now been connected to a criminal enterprise.

The former president’s company now stands “convicted of crimes. That is consequential,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said after the verdict.

Significance of a special counsel

Mr. Trump thus has legal exposure on a number of fronts. But in particular, the appointment of Mr. Smith, the special counsel, may have heightened Mr. Trump’s vulnerability to federal criminal charges, say some legal experts.

Mr. Smith has a reputation among some of his peers for aggressiveness. Andrew Weissmann, former lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, tweeted this warning upon announcement of Mr. Smith’s new position: “I was described ... as a pit bull. Jack Smith makes me look like a golden retriever puppy.”

His appointment appears intended to put some substantive and political distance between Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department’s Trump investigations. In his announcement of the special counsel appointment, Mr. Garland cited Mr. Trump’s announcement that he’s running again for president and Mr. Biden’s “stated intention to be a candidate as well.”

But it is also an unmistakable sign that the government’s Trump probes are serious and charges are a real possibility. Why bother to appoint a special counsel for an investigation that is winding down?

The Mar-a-Lago case centers on whether documents, including classified government records, were illegally mishandled when Mr. Trump left the White House and moved to his Florida resort, and whether Mr. Trump and his aides obstructed government attempts to find and retrieve the papers.

Mr. Smith – former head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and more recently a war crimes prosecutor in Europe – now has the power to decide whether to prosecute this case, as well as any high-level charges that might arise from the sweeping investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Mar-a-Lago is a much more straightforward investigation, and thus likely poses the most immediate danger to Mr. Trump and his aides, say some legal experts. It would be more like prosecuting a simple bank robbery or a narcotics transaction than a complex white-collar conspiracy, wrote former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti last month.

Andrew Harnik/AP

Attorney General Merrick Garland leaves after naming Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee the Justice Department's Trump investigations, at the Justice Department in Washington, Nov. 18, 2022. Following from left are Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Kenneth Polite, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves.

The FBI has already confiscated thousands of government-owned documents, including dozens of secret ones, from Mar-a-Lago under a duly ordered search warrant.

“By keeping Top Secret documents even after he received a grand jury subpoena and a personal visit from the DOJ demanding their return, Trump served up a very easy case to the DOJ,” wrote Mr. Mariotti.

Higher court rulings

Last week, a federal appeals court lifted a procedural hurdle that has slowed Justice Department progress in the Mar-a-Lago case. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled a judge was wrong to interfere with the investigation by appointing a special master to review material seized by the FBI from the former president’s resort.

Department of Justice investigators had been blocked from following up leads provided by the bulk of the documents while the special master had conducted his review.

The 11th Circuit ruling sharply criticized federal District Judge Aileen Cannon for approving the special master in the first place.

“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

Mr. Trump may appeal this ruling. But lately the former president has fared badly in the Supreme Court: Late last month high court justices, without noted dissent, cleared the way for House committees to receive several years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns from the IRS.

It is far from clear whether the special counsel will indict Mr. Trump or anyone else in the Mar-a-Lago matter. It is possible that Mr. Smith will work from the bottom up, pressuring lower-level aides in an effort to strengthen his evidence. Some legal experts believe the Justice Department might wait to develop an overarching case combining aspects of Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 insurrection before taking the profound step of indicting a former president. 

With the Georgia Senate runoff now concluded, the calendar is clear of possible political obstacles to legal action. But only for a short while. Given the length of time any court case against Mr. Trump would take, the Justice Department may soon be bumping up against the 2024 election cycle. 

Traditionally, the DOJ tries to avoid court actions that could affect elections for a 60- to 90-day window prior to the vote. Prosecutors would surely want to be thorough in presenting a case against the former president, and Mr. Trump would have numerous opportunities to appeal any outcome that went against him. Given that, any potential case would need to be charged by spring of 2023 at the latest, according to former federal prosecutor and Columbia Law Professor Jennifer Rogers.

Will past be precedent?

Of course, speculations about Mr. Trump’s legal troubles have proved wrong before.

The former president was not charged in the tax fraud case against his company that just wrapped up in a New York court. Last year, the Supreme Court dismissed several cases that charged Mr. Trump with violating the emoluments clauses of the Constitution and illegally profiting from his presidency.

As president, Mr. Trump was investigated by another special counsel, Mr. Mueller, over allegations his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia and then blocked government attempts to document the connection. Mr. Mueller concluded that he had insufficient evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy in the matter.

If indicted for stolen government documents, Mr. Trump could mount a number of possible defenses, according to an extensive charging memo developed by Just Security – among them, that he had declassified all documents while president, that following his presidency he had simply followed his lawyers’ advice in retaining them, or that subordinates had acted in the case without his knowledge or approval.

The special counsel could also decide that the cases he could reasonably bring and have a good chance of winning are not weighty enough to justify the uproar they would cause.

Ultimately, Mr. Smith – and Attorney General Garland, who has the power to countermand special counsel decisions – may have a difficult decision to weigh, says Professor Roiphe.

She says they might have to look at a potential indictment and decide “which is a greater harm, the prosecution and the loss of faith and disaffection of a significant portion of the population, or letting something like this go?”

“I don’t envy their decision,” Professor Roiphe says.

German police conducted the largest operation in their postwar history on Wednesday, staging over 130 raids on suspected terrorist-linked properties and arresting 25 people alleged to be involved in a plot to violently overthrow the government.

“The investigation will foremost give us a clear picture of how far along the coup planning actually was,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.

But the authorities held such strong suspicions about the target group’s “violent steps to carry out its action, that the Federal Court of Justice ordered investigative measures,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann tweeted.

The group was linked to QAnon and the Reichsbürger movement, a far-right fringe group that embraces “deep state” theories and advocates a return to the pre-World War II German Reich. Led by a minor German aristocrat named Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, the group intended to force its way into the Bundestag and install a new government, according to federal prosecutors.

Some of those arrested appear to be ex-military personnel, and federal investigators said that the group tried to contact the Russian government. All those arrested were German nationals, save one Russian.

“Militant Reichsbürger are united by their hatred of democracy, our state, and those who work for our well-being,” said Ms. Faeser. “That’s why we will use all legal tools at our disposal, and we will use them because it’s about protecting our democracy.”

“Aspiration plus operational abilities”

Wednesday’s raids were the latest in a series of efforts by the authorities to rid the security forces of neo-Nazis. The arrest of an army officer, now serving a five-year prison term for plotting the overthrow of the government, revealed widespread penetration of the military by far-right militants.

Christian Mang/Reuters

Police secure an area in Berlin on Dec. 7, 2022, after 25 suspected members and supporters of a far-right group were detained during raids across Germany. The raids are the latest in a series of efforts by the authorities to rid the security forces of neo-Nazis.

The Reichsbürger were armed, and had accepted that there would be deaths in their bid to “achieve systemic change at all levels,” according to a statement by German prosecutors. One of the accused is a former elected official, and the locations searched in Wednesday’s raids included barracks belonging to the KSK, a special forces unit previously linked to far-right terrorism. Another 27 suspects are under further investigation.

The scale of the investigation and ensuing raids, which involved multiple federal agencies and officials from 11 German states, demonstrated how serious a threat the authorities believe the extremist group posed, as well as the long arm of Germany’s democratic institutions.

“What’s troubling about today is you have aspiration coupled with operational abilities such as skill and access to weaponry,” says Steve Hewitt, a security expert at the University of Birmingham in England.

The raids “are reassuring on one hand,” says Dr. Hewitt, “but on the other hand it’s worrying because what else is out there? People have always had extreme ideas and conspiracy theories, but the internet’s reach, spread, and speed makes it more dangerous than when someone had their own printing press and handed out street flyers.”

Defensive democracy

Germany’s dark history has instilled an ardent modern desire to prevent the rise of another Adolf Hitler.

The constitution forged after World War II, corresponding security provisions, and modern-day legislation give the German government unusual power to investigate domestic extremist threats in the name of preserving democracy. The laws and rules that comprise Germany’s “defensive democracy” limit individual freedoms in the name of protecting the state.

For example, suspected extremist political parties in Germany can be monitored and surveilled or even declared unconstitutional, rendering them unable to carry out basic functions such as fundraising. Several German states have put the far-right political party Alternative for Germany under state surveillance, and a 2022 ruling classified the party as right-wing extremist and potentially subject to monitoring, even though it holds 78 seats in parliament.

“In the U.S. you [must] pose an immediate threat to someone or something ... but in Germany parties can be banned even if they are not preparing violent crimes,” says Fabian Virchow, head of a research unit studying far-right extremism at the University of Applied Sciences in Dusseldorf. “That, of course, is part of what Germany has experienced with the Nazi regime, and lessons learned.”

Germany’s security services also regularly investigate suspected far-right extremism inside military and police units. In 2020, Germany’s Defense minister dismantled a unit of the KSK after investigators found an underground bunker filled with Nazi artifacts and pilfered ammunition on a member’s property. 

Heiko Becker/Reuters

German Attorney General Peter Frank gives a statement on the arrest of far-right activists at the Federal Court of Justice, in Karlsruhe, Germany, Dec. 7, 2022. The investigation and ensuing raids involved multiple federal agencies and officials from 11 German states.

That same year, the German military reported missing more than 62 kilograms of explosives and 60,000 rounds of ammunition. Another 48,000 rounds had disappeared from the special forces units. Further, the security services identified over 1,400 suspected cases of far-right extremism among soldiers, police officers, and intelligence officers in the three years leading up to 2020.

In one of the highest-profile cases of far-right infiltration, a former lieutenant in the German army known as Franco A. was sentenced to five and a half years in prison last July. He was an active soldier when he was discovered to be hoarding ammunition and plotting to bring down the German state; his case revealed a network of far-right threats that permeated German security agencies at all levels. 

In 2019, the centre-right politician Walter Lübcke was assassinated on his doorstep by a neo-Nazi. Earlier, in 2011, a series of long-unsolved murders of immigrants was discovered to be the work of the National Socialist Underground, a neo-Nazi terrorist group with suspected police and security agency links. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel said investigation of the murders had uncovered “structures that we never imagined.”

The alleged plot uncovered on Wednesday may reach further than is immediately clear, says Dr. Hewitt, the counterterrorism expert.

“It’s similar to the United States, where you had the Republican Party and some elements playing footsie with the Capitol rioters,” he says. “There will be questions about links between political parties and those involved in the plots. This is a question for democracy, whether there are actual political parties that don’t believe in democratic systems.”

All Anas Atef wants is to open a restaurant and live next door to his parents.

His family has other plans for the 22-year-old college student: leave the country.

“The last thing I want to do is leave my family and community behind, although they are all telling me to leave,” Mr. Atef says. “I’m defying them and staying. But if the economy doesn’t turn around here, I won’t have a choice.”

In a kingdom where family and clan come first, emigrating as a life choice was uncommon, even a taboo.

But amid an economic tailspin, concerned Jordanians are urging their sons and daughters to find opportunities abroad – and not to look back – upending social norms. 

In response, Jordan’s leadership is racing to win over Mr. Atef’s increasingly disenfranchised generation with a new economic plan. Its goal: to revive a moribund economy and reverse a potential brain drain as talent and capital leave the country for regional neighbors and the West.   

The country is short on natural resources, water, and funds. But the biggest deficit the leadership faces? Trust.

Lots of youth, few jobs

Jordan is a young country – 60% of people are under the age of 30. Yet, while unemployment nationwide is 22%, among youth it hovers at 40%.

In an Arab Barometer survey released this summer, Jordan, considered an oasis of peace and stability in a troubled region, nevertheless ranked at the top of 10 Arab countries with citizens considering migration. Of those surveyed, 48% in Jordan said they were weighing emigration – more than in Lebanon, which is mired in an economic and humanitarian disaster (38%), or war-torn Libya (20%).

Roughly two-thirds of those Jordanians considering emigrating were between the ages of 18 and 29.

Jordanian youths cite broken trust among their reasons. They point to past crackdowns on protest movements focused on democracy and the economy, service cuts as proof that “the government doesn’t want change,” increased taxation, and programs and economic schemes from a dozen governments over the past decade that never materialized.

Now the Economic Modernization Vision, a plan formed by experts and launched by King Abdullah this summer, aims to overhaul the country’s economy and win over a skeptical public. 

The plan was developed after officials found that job growth in Jordan from 2010 to 2020 was “practically zero,” says an official involved with the plan.

It was a finding officials involved with the plan called “scary.”

Another alarming data point: While Jordanians have long worked in Gulf countries, sending salaries back home and purchasing apartments, more citizens were leaving for good, taking their talent and income with them.

Taylor Luck

Dr. Salma al Jaouni, CEO of Jordan's health care accreditation council and one of 500 experts who formed Jordan's Economic Modernization Vision, pitches the plan to 50 community members and university students in Madaba, in central Jordan, on Oct. 10, 2022.

For four months, a team of 500 experts assembled by the Royal Court hashed out a plan to overhaul the economy, boost income, and enhance quality of life.

The Vision aims to shift job growth from the debt-loaded public sector to the private sector by removing the bureaucratic obstacles and heavy taxation that have strangled growth and investment – and prevented many tech-savvy young Jordanians from starting businesses.

One core goal is to help create jobs for the 100,000 Jordanians entering the job market annually for the next decade, which would prevent unemployment from climbing further, and likely keep it at 20%.

What makes this plan different, advocates say, is a royal guarantee of sorts, a break from a traditionally hands-off palace. Rather than leave implementation of the Vision solely to a revolving door of king-appointed governments, the Royal Court is acting as a facilitator to ensure there is progress.

The government has yet to come up with an action plan for the Vision or even a budget. The Royal Court and private sector are promoting the plan on their own.

Town hall

Jordan has been sending members of the private sector – men and women who are leaders in their fields and who helped craft the plan – to roll out the Vision in town halls across the country.

But it has been a tough sell.

On an October afternoon in Madaba, 30 miles south of Amman, 40 young women and 10 young men – university students and unemployed graduates – and a dozen concerned parents gathered for a town hall meeting at the local headquarters of the We Are All Jordan Youth Commission, a youth initiative launched by King Abdullah in 2006.

Two Vision planners – Fadel El-Zubi, an agriculture expert and former official at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and Dr. Salma al Jaouni, CEO of Jordan’s health care accreditation council – energetically laid out the new plan and its promise to unlock young Jordanians’ potential.

“Human resources are Jordan’s best resource. This Vision facilitates their potential, solutions, and innovations,” Mr. Zubi says. 

“Jordan has high unemployment and high taxes. How can this Vision be activated when we face such challenges?” shouted a young woman.

“With all our respect to you as guests to our town: Why should we believe you this time?” said another.

“My son is a chemical engineer, and he has been unemployed for six years,” said a sheikh in a gold-trimmed beige abaya cloak. “All we hear is eloquent words from government, and watch unemployment, poverty, and hunger rise. We want to see results.”

Mr. Atef, the college student, who was present that day, listened intensely to the presentation, seeking insight into the country’s economic future.

Unlike his friends who have left for far corners of the globe – to Saudi Arabia, Japan, the United States – he wants to stay.

“I wanted to hear if they had real steps to the future, something to get hopeful about,” Mr. Atef says later. “The proof will be acts on the ground.”

Ruba Abu Hani, like the majority of her classmates, has been unemployed since she graduated with an English degree from an Amman university three years ago.

She wants to open an early education nursery and preschool and employ fresh graduates, but she lacks funds. Vision advocates say the plan would link her to a bank, but the lack of involvement by young people in the Vision – and in wider policymaking in Jordan – leaves her pessimistic.

“People who have no connection to our generation or understand us are making the policies,” Ms. Abu Hani says. “Parliament, the government, no one represents us. They can’t help us; we have to help ourselves. They just need to give us a chance to do so.”

Wanting to stay

Abdullah Awaideh is the type of young Jordanian the Vision says it is targeting.

Taylor Luck

Abdullah Awaideh, one of many young Jordanians struggling to find ways to stay in their homeland, grooms his family's horse at the family's ancestral home in the town of Dhiban, in central Jordan, on Oct. 15, 2022.

The recent engineering graduate volunteers at multiple international NGOs, is a member of the Jordan National Women’s Commission youth board, and gives civics lessons to ninth- and 10th-graders on how to move past tribal ties when voting for local representatives. He wants to open a nongovernmental organization to empower youths and organize community service.

Last year, when his father urged him to apply for the U.S. visa lottery to migrate and “find his future,” Mr. Awaideh refused, sparking a monthslong argument he now jokingly calls “a family war.”

“Before, leaving the country for good was discouraged. Now my father is telling me, ‘You have no future prospects here. Go abroad to start your life,’” Mr. Awaideh says.

“But I want to give back to my community and my country. I know that if I stay there is a chance people like me can work toward positive change,” he says. “If we leave, that change will never happen.”

Success can be had, some say.

Some 15 miles south of Madaba, Jaafer Al Kawamleh has turned his passion for hiking and adventure tourism in nearby gorges and waterfalls into a career, and he now manages the Wadi Hidan Adventure Center and a separate campsite several miles outside his hometown Dhiban.

“The opportunities are there, you just have to create them and take them,” he says.

Mr. Atef, the would-be restaurateur, says he is “giving Jordan two years.”

“If I feel like things are improving, I will stay and try to forge my own career. If not, I will have to leave.”

As for the civics-minded Mr. Awaideh, he too has a backup plan in case authorities reject his application for an NGO license: apply for a U.S. visa.  

“I have long been against emigrating, but this is becoming my option of last resort,” he says with a pained smile. “You have to keep all options open in order to find your future. But we hope our future paths will return us home. Eventually.”

Anna Lapwood’s rehearsals start at midnight. 

Several times a month, the 20-something millennial locks herself inside London’s Royal Albert Hall after audiences have gone home. Then she practices playing the venue’s mammoth pipe organ until dawn. It’s her opportunity to play loudly without disturbing anyone. 

Occasionally, a cleaner whistles along to her melodies. But at 1 a.m. on May 21, someone yelled out a request, Toccata and Fugue in D minor. She obliged by performing Bach. The heckler was a band member for the electronic musician known as Bonobo, who’d played the hall earlier that evening. One thing led to another and, the following night, Bonobo’s next concert at the venue climaxed with the surprise entrance of Ms. Lapwood’s organ. The audience roared in delight. In the following days, her cellphone video of the moment was viewed over 2.7 million times on TikTok.

“I still am getting people coming to my concerts who say that they’ve never been to a classical concert before ... but they saw that video of Bonobo,” marvels Ms. Lapwood in a Zoom interview. “And I just love that.”

Ms. Lapwood is one of classical music’s biggest breakout stars in years. She’s familiar to British television viewers as the host of the BBC Young Musician competition. But she first made her mark by being appointed director of music at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College at age 21. Since then she’s established the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir, which just released a Christmas album. A star on TikTok and Instagram, Ms. Lapwood challenges perceptions of the pipe organ as a fusty, old-fashioned instrument through her viral videos. The keys to her success? Talent, an exacting work ethic, and radiant enthusiasm.

Robert Piwko/Courtesy of Music Productions

Anna Lapwood conducts a community choir at the Leeds Lieder Festival in Leeds, England. She is the founder and conductor of the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir, for singers from the city of Cambridge ages 11 to 18. The group is featured on her latest album, “A Pembroke Christmas.”

“She brings enormous joy to her job,” says Amanda Holloway, a freelance journalist who writes for publications like BBC Music Magazine, in a Zoom call. “She shows that music doesn’t have to be dull or serious or difficult.”

When Ms. Lapwood was a teenager, she played harp in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. She was also skilled at piano and violin. But when she first tried the pipe organ, it didn’t come naturally to her. 

“The emotional side of it is nowhere near as immediate,” says the musician. “If you play harder, it doesn’t get louder, right? It’s all about gradation of touch and articulation and the illusion of emotion and how you achieve that. ... I found it really hard. But because I didn’t like it, and because I found it hard, I was determined to tackle it.” 

During Ms. Lapwood’s final year of an organ scholarship at Oxford University, judges at a competition admonished her to “play more like a man.”

“I have no problem with someone telling you that you need power and authority,” she reflects. “I have a real issue with that being equated to gender.” 

In an effort to encourage young women to try their hand at the instrument, Ms. Lapwood founded the Cambridge Organ Experience for Girls. She also adopted a “tongue-in-cheek” hashtag on social media: #playlikeagirl. In one such TikTok video, she performs something akin to advanced yoga by lifting her foot onto the organ console to pull out the stops while her hands are busy. Ms. Lapwood’s videos exhibit her innate exuberance. When you “do the thing that you really, really, really love,” she says, “you kind of owe it to the world to be happy.” 

The musician adds, “If I’m having a bad day, I try to focus on brightening someone else’s day, and it almost always turns that around and makes my day better, too.” 

Martin Stevens/Courtesy of Music Productions

Anna Lapwood plays at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, England. Besides being a popular organist, she is also a conductor and a broadcaster.

Ms. Lapwood also cultivates joy via annual visits to Zambia to teach in low-income communities. “I work with these phenomenal singers who learned from watching YouTube videos of Pavarotti,” she says. “[It’s] an exchange of ideas. I come back having learned so much about the importance of movement to how we sing.”  

Some of those ideas feed into her approach to conducting the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir. It’s a 24-voice group, ages 11 to 18, whose new release, “A Pembroke Christmas,” eschews commonplace singalongs like “Jingle Bells.” Indeed, the album, which also includes the Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, opens with an unconventional a cappella piece, “The Nine Orders of the Angels: II. Archangelus” by contemporary composer Patricia Van Ness.

“The singer we’ve got, Elsa, this incredible soprano, has such an expressive voice,” the conductor enthuses. “Just her singing solo chant is, for me, such an atmospheric thing and sets up a completely different world and prepares you for the experience for the album.”

The organist is similarly committed to diversifying the repertoire for organ. Her 2021 debut solo album, “Images,” features Debussy and Ravel but also modern composers such as Kerensa Briggs and Cheryl Frances-Hoad. 

“She’s not ashamed of playing big pieces that were written with the organ in mind, but are definitely not church music or big Bach pieces,” says Ms. Holloway, the classical music writer. “That’s how she gets to younger people.”

TikTok is another form of outreach. Ms. Lapwood’s videos include renditions of “The Simpsons” theme and a riff from AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Those two in particular showcase the Royal Albert Hall organ’s 9,999 pipes, towering above her like a golden suspension bridge.

“It has the expressive capabilities of an entire orchestra, but manned by one person,” muses the organist. “It’s often used to mark the big moments in life: baptisms, weddings, funerals. ... But I think there’s also something to be said for trying to remind people that it doesn’t just live in a sacred context.”

As one of the venue’s associate artists, Ms. Lapwood seeks out opportunities to network with performers. That’s how she met Benedict Cumberbatch. 

In October, the “Sherlock” and “Doctor Strange” actor was performing as part of “Letters Live,” where historic pieces of correspondence are read. She offered him a tour of the organ; he performed a Bach fugue in C major. The actor asked her to close his next show with a Hans Zimmer composition from the movie “Interstellar.” “When Benedict Cumberbatch cried when I was playing, I found that really moving and humbling,” she says. “It was like, ‘Yes! This instrument can make people feel emotions.’” 

The musician relishes a full calendar, which, on April 1, 2023, includes a performance with the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, California.  

“I tend to have a day about once a month where I will just sleep all day,” she says. “But I would prefer to make the most of the time I’ve got to make things a little bit more positive, even if it’s only in my little bubble.”

Reuters

Leaders from the European Union and Western Balkan nations watch local dancers at a summit in Tirana, Albania, Dec. 6.

Hope is not a strategy, as military brass often say, which may best describe the European Union’s new attitude toward its neighbors in the southeast corner of the Continent. At a summit Tuesday with leaders of Western Balkan countries, the EU did more than again dangle a promise of eventual membership in the world’s wealthiest bloc.

Stirred into action by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU has now shifted from being mainly an attractive beacon of soft-power idealism to one of practical embrace of six wannabe members in the Balkans: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia.

Or as the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, tweeted, “Regional cooperation cannot be detached from our common values.”

The summit resulted in the EU offering more than $1 billion in subsidies to help the Balkans deal with the energy crisis caused by the Ukraine war and to assist its integration into the EU’s green energy projects. For the first time, EU border control officers will operate in the Balkans to stem a rise in illegal migration. For cellphone users, roaming charges between the bloc and the Balkans will be phased out. And the EU offered closer ties between institutions of higher education to help stem a brain drain of young people from the Balkans.

“In the changed security situation, we have to cooperate more than before and support those countries that share the same values and views of a Europe,” said Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said at a meeting.

The key driver in this shift is Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who is seeking new partnerships with democracies in less wealthy countries. As he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, “This commonality plays a crucial role – not because we aim to pit democracies against authoritarian states, which would only contribute to a new global dichotomy, but because sharing democratic values and systems will help us define joint priorities and achieve common goals in the new multipolar reality of the twenty-first century.”

At the summit, Mr. Scholz said the EU’s actions would “in very concrete terms ... improve the lives of individuals in the region and make the region more united.” Such steps will spur the pace of reforms needed in the Balkans to meet EU standards for membership, such as rule of law and media freedom.

The EU’s accession process has stalled since Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007, a result of the bloc’s internal problems, such as Brexit and the 2008 financial crisis. Croatia was the latest applicant to join the bloc, in 2013.

Jolted by Russia’s aggression, the EU has now upped its commitment to the region, turning its common values into actual value, moving from hope to making headway.