Permanent Cap

The national campaign spending limit exists to stop political parties from buying their way into office. It is supposed to level the playing field for all parties during an election and to ensure, in the words of the Supreme Court, that “no one voice is overwhelmed by another.”

But this law is easily circumvented by well-off political parties who simply spend their excess money in the months leading up to the election campaign. The governing party benefits the most since the prime minister still has the right to choose when an election will take place.

We should therefore move to install a permanent cap on the spending of political parties. This limit would be set low enough to put all parties on an equivalent financial footing, but leave room for them to run day-to-day operations, to consult with Canadians, and to deliver their message. Let’s not forget that, regardless of the spending limit, elections always produce a winner. Some are fairer though, and some see less money go from the pocket of concerned Canadians into the coffers of ad agencies and polling companies.

Elections

J’affirmais dans mon dernier message que Steven Harper ne déclencherait pas d’élections avant l’ouverture de la prochaine session parlementaire. C'est encore mon avis. Mais ce qui n’était il y a 48 heures qu’une simple rumeur pourrait maintenant facilement se concrétiser. Si bien que la semaine prochaine, oui, la semaine prochaine, il est fort possible que le pays soit plongé dans une campagne électorale qui promet d’être dure et vicieuse.

On a aujourd’hui appris que le bureau du premier ministre a annulé le voyage en Chine de la gouverneure générale prévu pour la semaine du cinq septembre pour s’assurer de sa présence au cas où Stephen Harper voudrait provoquer des élections. Hier, le ministre de la justice Rob Nicholson a aussi annulé la lecture en Chambre d’un projet de loi controversé introduit par un député conservateur de l’Alberta qui devait donner aux foetus un statut juridique. Beaucoup de gens percevaient ce projet de loi comme un pas vers l’abolition du droit à l’avortement.

Il semblerait vraiment que le premier ministre veuille aller en élections. Des signes comme ceux-là mentent rarement. Mais je maintiens qu’elles viendront plus tard, sans doute vers la fin du mois de septembre. Ou alors, il faudrait que le premier ministre redoute quelque chose dont le public n’a pas encore été informé. On verra, mais pour le moment, les paris sont ouverts.

Why There Won't Be An Election

There’s been an increasing amount of speculation in the past few days that Stephen Harper could send the country into an election by asking the Governor General to dissolve Parliament. Despite what the story-starved media may be claiming, this is a baseless rumour.

Stephen Harper has two obvious reasons for keeping Parliament alive:

-He passed a law two years ago which brought in fixed election dates. This meant that unless the government were to be defeated in a confidence vote, an election would be held on the fixed date: Monday, October 19 2009. Of course, the law didn’t strip Harper from his constitutional right to call an election, but the public backlash associated with him breaking his own promise would be such that it would only make sense to do so if he were certain of a major victory.

-He isn’t certain of a major victory. The latest Harris-Decima poll puts him in a statistical tie with the Liberals, whom he trails in both Ontario and Québec.

The lesson to learn from this story is that political columnists (and bloggers like myself) have little material to draw from in the month of August, one of the reasons for which it wouldn’t be such a pity if the Ottawa Chamberfest were lengthened by a week.

Food Inspection

After two weeks of chamber music, it’s time to get back to politics.

The Globe and Mail reports that a second life may have been claimed by the outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes which has caused havoc in the meat packing industry. Maple Leap Food Inc., the company that owns the Toronto plant from where the outbreak is thought to have originated, has already been forced to recall two million dollars worth of meat products that can be found in supermarkets and restaurants like MacDonald’s and Mr. Sub. More recalls are expected in the next few days.

The sheer scale of this bacterial outbreak raises the question of why on earth the problem wasn’t spotted earlier. Experts from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have only recently been able to establish the presence of Listeria in Maple Leaf Food’s Sure Slice brand of roast beef: it’s too little, too late.

The problem is that health officials can only monitor 2% of the food that is shipped to consumers. Most of what ends up on our plate is trucked directly from the plant with no inspection whatsoever in between.

Leaked Cabinet documents reveal that the Conservatives were planning on reducing spending in the Canadian Food Inspection Agency by shifting the responsibility of monitoring food safety to the industry. The announcement of the policy was apparently delayed “owing to significant communication risks” (e.i. it would go down terribly in the polls), but Cabinet remains committed to releasing it at some point in the next year.

This Conservative plan would hand the responsibility of monitoring the safety of meat products to the industry that produces them. This equates to asking inmates to guard their own jail. The Liberals and NDP rightly derided the proposal and Stéphane Dion even likened it to the Harris Government measures that led to the Walkerton disaster.

But the opposition didn’t have to launch such a childish and demagogical attack on the government when at least half of policy makes perfect sense. Industry should play a bigger role in food safety control and the sooner that responsibility is bestowed on it, the better it is for the consumer. However, industry should not replace the government health officials but merely complement them. Hopefully, this will make it possible to change that dismal 2% figure that I mentioned earlier on.

Inmates should be given security duties and asked to keep watch over their fellow prisoners. But the jail guards should also keep their jobs!

Closing Gala Concert

I apologize for taking so long to publish the last instalment in my series of Chamberfest reviews. I’ve been away from Ottawa with my family since the morning after the last concert and I haven’t had any access to a computer since! This prolonged leave of absence mightn’t turn out to be such a bad thing though, as it gave me much needed time to think over what was undoubtedly the most perplexing concert that I saw. I still haven’t made my mind up, but my thoughts are now significantly clearer!

The music of the Closing Gala was perhaps the best of the festival. Certainly the most powerful that I heard in my two weeks of concert-going: it was a truly fantastic blend of excitement, provocation and novelty. Both of the two works performed stood out for their wonderful innovation and musical openness, with seemingly equal inspiration drawn from Bernstein’s West Side Story and Bach’s classical Cantatas. Bass soloist Robert Pomakov’s decision to wear a Hawaiian shirt in front of the choir dressed in traditional black garments literally embodied this theme.

It was wonderful for the Closing Gala to consist only of new Canadian music (composed in 2004 and 2006 by Larysa Kuzmenko and Christos Hatzis). I would hope that it was selected solely for its musical merit rather than as a political statement, but regardless of the motivations, it was certainly good enough to justify the choice.

What I found slightly troubling about the concert was not the quality of the music but its place in the Chamberfest Closing Gala. When the Gryphon Trio took over the artistic leadership of the festival, they made it clear that they would shift the focus away from the traditional repertoire written by dead-white-European-men towards more modern, Canadian music. In principle, their objective is praiseworthy and a positive step for the Festival. But I do feel that in their zeal to give more space to contemporary Canadian music, they have sacrificed part of the original mission of Chamberfest, which remains fundamentally to bring chamber music to the Ottawa area.

In the Closing Gala, the music was wonderful, but it wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination chamber music. There were on stage two full sized choirs, a soloist and the Gryphon Trio. Such an ensemble can produce -and did produce- truly fantastic music, but not chamber music.

If such a concert had taken place earlier in the week, I wouldn’t have felt in the least uncomfortable. In the future though, I would consider it a matter of principle and artistic focus that the Closing Gala Concert of Chamberfest feature what the festival does best: chamber music and only chamber music.

Leipzig String Quartet

The first thing I noticed about the Leipzig String Quartet was the fantastic mood of the musicians. They were all smiling pleasantly, exchanging quick laughs between movements and making discreet gestures to the visibly delighted audience.

The second thing I noticed is that they were all melting away. Ottawa’s August humidity was clearly a problem for this group of Germans from Leipzig (much more so than for musicians of the Shanghai Quartet) who were constantly having to pull a white cloth out of their pockets to wipe away the perspiration dripping from their faces.

But the main thing was the music, and it was great. The execution was exciting and full of panache, the shaping was innovative without being distracting and the repertoire, yes the repertoire, was finally conservative: Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich.

I was truly impressed by the wonderful ability of these Germans to sing. They didn’t just play notes, they played music by treating each note as a syllable and each bar as a key word of a song. Every last bit of music was sucked out of the page with the end result often sending shivers up my spine. It helped of course that they played Mendelssohn and Beethoven, two composers with a real knack for melody , but even the Shostakovich G minor piano Quintet performed jointly with Stéphane Lemelin had intricate phrasing and real lyricism.

My only criticism is the same one that I make after every concert, namely: I want more sound. I’m beginning to think that it must have something to do with church acoustics or my seating in the hall because I consistently feel that performers could easily double the volume without hurting anyone’s ears. The NAC Music Director Pinchas Zukerman likes to use the phrase “Play to the exit sign” to help young musicians perform with a full sound. And while Zukerman may be a soloist rather than a chamber musician, his advice still applies to the Chamberfest musicians: a sound that can fill the hall right up to the exit sign is more exciting not only for its added power and depth, but also for making possible the stark volume contrasts that are so fundamentally important to chamber music.

Hoebig-Moroz

A very pleasant concert yesterday at noon featuring the violin-piano duo of Gwen Hoebig and David Moroz. On the program were Beethoven's 10th Sonata, Brahms' 2^nd Sonata, and two contemporary works by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Hoebig's sound is truly beautiful. She has a marvellous warm timber which fit perfectly with pianist Moroz playing on a Steinway Grand, and there was some absolutely wonderful shaping and expressive interplay between the two instruments.

The musicians had just recently arrived from Calgary, however, and there were visibly some rusty fingers at the beginning of the performance. The Brahms sonata wasn't therefore quite as perfect as might otherwise have been the case, though the piece is such a crowd-pleaser that most in the audience –including myself- were more than ready to forgive the occasional tentative passage.

Neither of the two works by Arvo Pärt were on the programme, which I found surprising given that they both looked extremely difficult. I've heard of musicians replacing a difficult piece with an easy one, but the reverse is less often encountered! Their success was hard to judge. Some people in the audience were visibly elated but others looked bored stiff. For my part, I was ambivalent. The execution was good, but they didn't sell me on the musical interest of the work.
In contemporary music where many passages are not easily accessible, the performer needs to work especially hard to keep the audience's attention. With a few more dramatic volume and tempo contrasts, I suspect that I would have found it easier to stay focused on the music.

The Beethoven 10th Sonata was a delight. It's a work that usually sounds good, but this duo really made it special by exaggerating the contrasts that are so essential to Beethoven. Hoebig's sound, although very lovely, is also quite small. I would have been happy with twice as much sound for the whole duration of the concert, but for lack of having both a big sound and being beautiful, it's better to be beautiful!

Musical Musing with Harry Halbreich

Musicologist Harry Halbreich’s reflexions on the day’s program this morning at Dominion-Chalmers were absorbing albeit unexciting. Halbreich is a true Chamber Music expert and had many interesting facts and anecdotes to share with his audience. He spoke at length about composers such as Stravinski, Janacek, and Valentin Silvestrov, and also delivered a pointed critique of the 1950s minimalist movement.

Though his command of English was quite exceptional, he had a tendency to speak in a monochord tone and sometimes lost part of his audience. He also made a few bizarre and slightly inappropriate comments, including one alluding to the fact that he was against the death penalty because he was a believer and followed the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”.

At any rate, the lecture was pleasant and informative, but perhaps not engaging enough to make me want to go on a daily basis.

Music Moves

The festival’s main contemporary music concert took place last Wednesday evening at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. On the program were well known groups such as the Gryphon Trio and the Penderecki String Quartet, as well as a much publicised collaborative performance between Canadian composer Omar Daniel and violinist Erika Raum.

It was clear from the outset that this concert would be about pushing the boundaries: not just contemporary music, but 21^st century contemporary music. It was also clear that the concert would be Canadian. In fact, of the 19 artists who performed on stage, all were Canadian (it might also be added that they all came from the GTA, but that’s another story). On that front, the artists and organisers deserve our most sincere congratulations. There is nothing more important than encouraging innovation in music, and if it can happen in Canada, all the better!

It is possible, however, that the artists went too far in their creative exploration. Every work that was performed last Wednesday had at least one wonderful element. It could be an interesting choreography, an innovative use of digital playback, or, in the case of the first work, plain old good music. Unfortunately, that single wonderful element was systematically masked by a plethora of entirely useless distractions. The most glaring was the decision to amplify the Gryphon Trio’s performance of “Memory, Distance and no time for Dances” when the hall was small and the music free of any digital sound effects… but there were others. In the much hyped performance of “The Flaying of Marsyas”, for instance, composer Omar Daniel hung by his ankles in a tubular metal cage to control, through a series of cables and wires, the volume and sound effects of the violin performance of Erika Raum. The music was great, once again, but the sight of a half-naked composer hanging upside down in the middle of the stage was not an example of profound symbolism, but a truly unwelcome distraction from an otherwise wonderful violin performance.

It’s better to innovate too much than too little. However, in the future, it would be preferable if the audience left the concert feeling that boundaries had been pushed, not for the sake of pushing, but to create a better work of art.