Michel Tabachnik (born November 10, 1942) is a Swiss conductor and composer with an international career. A promoter of contemporary music, he has premiered a dozen works by Iannis Xenakis, among others. He is also the author of essays on music and novels. In 1995, he was implicated in the case regarding the mass murder-suicides of the Order of the Solar Temple, from which he was acquitted by the courts.

Early life

Tabachnik was born in Geneva, where he studied piano, composition and conducting. As a young conductor he was a protégé of Igor Markevitch, Herbert von Karajan and Pierre Boulez, acting as the latter's assistant for four years, mainly with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London. This led him to become closely involved with conducting and to perform many world premieres, particularly those of Iannis Xenakis.

Early career

He was Artistic Director of l'Orchestre des Jeunes du Québec (1985–1989) and, over a twelve-year period, l'Orchestre des jeunes de la Méditerranée which he founded in 1984. He has held the position of Chief Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the Orchestre national de Lorraine, the Ensemble InterContemporain in Paris and the Northern Netherlands Orchestra (Groningen). In addition to his work as a conductor, Tabachnik is also a composer. He has been honored with many commissions including "La Légende de Haïsha" for the anniversary of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution, "Le Cri de Mohim" for the 700th Year of Switzerland, and "Le Pacte des Onze" for I.R.C.A.M. Paris. Tabachnik records for Erato and Lyrinx, with whom he has been associated since 1991. His discography includes Beethoven, Wagner, Honegger and Iannis Xenakis. His recording of the Schumann Piano Concerto (with Catherine Collard as soloist) was voted Best Performance of the work by the international jury at the Radio Suisse Romande. In 1995, Tabachnik was named Artist of the Year by the Italian "Centro Internazionale di Arte e Cultura" in Rome.

Solar Temple

Passionate about philosophy, esotericism and spirituality, Michel Tabachnik met in 1977 Joseph Di Mambro, one of the two future leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS). In 1981, he became the president of the Golden Way Foundation that Di Mambro had created three years earlier in Geneva. Within the framework of the OTS, Tabachnik wrote the Archées, esoteric texts that circulated within the OTS. Prior to the 1994 mass suicide, which included the group's leaders, he had announced the end of the OTS. Between 1994 and 2006, following the mass suicides that occurred within the OTS, he was prosecuted in France for "participation in an association of criminals" on the basis of his writings. On June 25, 2001, he was acquitted by the Grenoble criminal court. The public prosecutor's office having appealed, he was acquitted a second time in December 2006. The public prosecutor had considered that Tabachnik was not an important member of the OTS and that there was no proof that he had knowingly participated in the crimes the OTS committed, and that his writings were "esoteric gibberish". The Swiss justice system dismissed the cases of the October 1994 tragedies in Salvan and Cheiry, Switzerland.

Later career

Since September 2005, Tabachnik is chief-conductor of the Noord Nederlands Orkest (NNO). From 2008 until 2015, Tabachnik was the music director and chief-conductor of the Brussels Philharmonic. Speaking on his involvement with the OTS, Tabachnik appeared in two 2022 documentary series on the case, Temple Solaire: l'enquête impossible and La Fraternité. It took two years to convince Tabachnik to be interviewed for La Fraternité; director Pierre Morath described him as "traumatized" by the whole affair and that it was "almost a miracle" he had agreed, with a fear that people would distort his words as had happened before. Temple Solaire: l'enquête impossible also featured Bouleau and Bédat, both who had accused of him of being involved in the massacre. His appearance in the documentary took many weeks of convincing by the production team. Bédat described their meeting, noting that Tabachnik "agreed to an interview, yelled at me for two hours and then it was over. We became friends". During an interview for the promotion of the series, Bédat stated he had changed his mind and no longer believed that Tabachnik had planned the deaths, and that him being away in concert had perhaps stopped him from being killed as well.

Publications

Compositions