Michel Tabachnik offers programs that combine traditional symphonic repertoire with 20th-century compositions, emphasizing the continuity between the music of the past and the present.
Co-founder, alongside Pierre Boulez, of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, he has served as Music Director of the Brussels Philharmonic, the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Lorraine, and has been a guest conductor for renowned ensembles such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, the Orchestre de Paris, as well as at festivals like Lucerne, Salzburg, and Aix-en-Provence. He has frequently been invited by institutions such as SWR Stuttgart, the Residentie Orkest in The Hague, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and NDR Hamburg.
For six years, he was the Music Director of the Noord Nederlands Orkest, later being named its Conductor Emeritus. With the Brussels Philharmonic, he was regularly invited to La Cité de la Musique in Paris and toured cities like Berlin, London, Vienna, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Salzburg, as well as Germany and the Far East.
He has conducted extensively in Italy, leading the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Turin, Teatro Comunale in Bologna, and Teatro La Fenice in Venice. At the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, he conducted the premiere of Ivan Fedele’s Antigone with stage direction by Mario Martone. In opera, he has been invited to houses such as the Paris Opera, Geneva, Zurich, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Montreal, the Bolshoi Theatre, and the Toronto Opera, where he conducted productions of Lohengrin, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, and The Rake’s Progress.
He studied piano, composition, and conducting in Geneva and was soon invited by prominent conductors like Pierre Boulez, Herbert von Karajan, and Igor Markevitch. He became Markevitch’s assistant at the Radio Orchestra in Madrid and later served as Boulez’s assistant at the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London for four years. These collaborations brought him closer to contemporary music. He conducted world premieres by composers such as Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, and Messiaen, dedicating particular attention to the works of Iannis Xenakis, who regarded him as his reference interpreter.
For twelve years, Michel Tabachnik was the Artistic Director of the Orchestre des Jeunes du Québec and the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée, which he founded in 1984. A respected teacher, he has conducted masterclasses in Hilversum, Lisbon (Gulbenkian Foundation), and at the Conservatories of Paris, Brussels, and Stockholm. He has also been appointed Professor of Conducting at the University of Toronto and the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.
His discography (on Erato and Lyrinx labels) reflects the eclecticism of his repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to Honegger, Wagner to Xenakis. His recording of Schumann’s Piano Concerto was selected by the international jury of Radio Suisse Romande as the best interpretation of this piece. Other recordings with the Brussels Philharmonic include The Rite of Spring (Gramophone Awards, 2013) and Debussy’s La Mer, ranked No. 1 by Classica magazine.
As a composer, Michel Tabachnik has conducted several of his own works, including Lumières Fossiles in the Netherlands, Prélude à la légende at the Besançon Festival, and his Violin Concerto with the Brussels Philharmonic. He premiered Livre de Job at La Cité de la Musique in Paris. The world premiere of his opera La dernière nuit de Walter Benjamin, with a libretto by Régis Debray, commissioned by the Lyon Opera, took place on March 15, 2016, in Lyon.