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Le Grand Échiquier
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Michel Tabachnik (born 10 November 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.
Tabachnik has an interest in esotericism and spirituality, and beginning in the 1970s he was a member of the Golden Way Foundation and its successor group the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS), run by Joseph Di Mambro. In 1994, the Solar Temple committed mass suicide, and following another mass suicide the next year, Tabachnik was investigated and tried twice for responsibility in the OTS deaths. Tabachnik was acquitted on all counts in both trials, and returned to conducting.
Tabachnik was born in Geneva, Switzerland on 10 November 1942. His father was a trombonist. In 1976, the French Minister of Culture Michel Guy gave him creative control over the direction of two new orchestras. He got his degree in music theory.
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.
In June 1977, having an interest in esotericism, Tabachnik met Joseph Di Mambro, one of the two future leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple, a group notorious for mass suicides and murders in the 1990s. He had been introduced with his wife Christiane Meylan to La Pyramide, a precursor group, by Nicole Koymans; he joined the next year. He had two children with Meylan. In 1981, he became the president of the Golden Way Foundation that Di Mambro created.
Within the framework of the OTS, Tabachnik wrote the Archées, esoteric texts that circulated within the OTS. In 1981, he switched wives with Christian Pechot, also a member of the OTS, with Pechot marrying to Meylan and Tabachnik marrying Pechot's wife Sabine Reuter, who was a student of Di Mambro. He and Sabine moved to Toronto in 1984, as he found conductor work there, which Di Mambro used as a reason to move the group to Canada. Within the group, his son David was considered one of the "cosmic children", who would form an elite population following the end of the world.
