In the west, Russian composer Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky is best known as a conductor and recording artist for EMI, whose exclusive focus has been in the Romantic repertoire. This concentration has apparently influenced his compositions, since the music sounds similar in many ways to nineteenth century fare, only modified through minimalist techniques and boosted through amplification to sound more modern and edgy. The lush chord progressions and chromatic melodic snippets of Tantric Coupling seem transplanted from the sound world of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, and while listening to Maithuna (2005) and Jiao (2004), one will be reminded of their lavish scores. Rabinovitch-Barakovsky's repetitious and statically tonal works are meant to be part of a larger project, his expansively conceived "Anthology of Archaic Rituals -- In Search of the Center," to which he attaches a great deal of his anthropological theories and mystical thought, as expounded in his liner notes. This grand scheme includes both the 2004 Megadisc release Pura Cosa Mentale, as well as this 2006 album, and seems to be an all-embracing, theologically themed magnum opus. While these works may suggest extra-musical parallels to Alexander Scriabin's ecstatic, eschatological Mysterium, there is something vaguely contrived about Rabinovitch-Barakovsky's music and its metaphysical import. Even though one hesitates to question his personal mysticism, his music is fair game: the raw materials seem trite, weak, and uninteresting; the obsessive patterns seem mindless and mechanical, rather than rapturous; and the effect of both Maithuna and Jiao is manic, not mystical. The performances by the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto and the
Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles, led respectively by Rabinovitch-Barakovsky and Jean-Paul Dessy, are highly energetic and precise, and Megadisc's recording is loud and clear, so little is missed. However, Tantric Coupling is a disappointing album on purely musical grounds, and is far from a transcendental listening experience.