"Five Smallest orgasms, oc.29 (1986) were written as a direct response to Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. A “Certain Concerto” for piano & orchestra, oc.31 (1987) was written in the genre of “false concerto”, concerto/deception, where the listener is constantly deceived, having his/her expectations crowned with emptiness. The theme of deception is one of the main features of Khanin’s creations. “Middle Symphony”, oc.40 (1990), with a text by the composer, is a large, quite extraordinary work with a rather unnatural and affected structure. It ends with a canon in which the three singers sing the same text backwards for 81 bars. The text is very abstruse, in fact almost absurd; it becomes necessary to overturn one’s impression of the whole symphony just listened to… Does this discussion exhaust the subject of this disc? I don’t know – I doubt it".
Yuri Khanon is not just a composer; he is also a Writer, a Philosopher, a Painter, a studio Pianist, and a botanist-selectionist. Khanon is author of libretto and texts of almost all his works. His grandfather was Mikhail Savoyarov, a comic actor and Composer, who was very famous in St.Petersburg (Petrograd) on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.
Since 1983, Khanon writes fiction and non-fiction as an Essayist and Novelist. His most famous work is 700 pages long memoir novel “Skryabin As a Face” (1995) based on the 20 years long Khanon’s close acquaintance with the great Russian Composer Alexander Skryabin. Part of the edition is a true polygraphic artwork produced with a natural leather binding, hand-made according to a 19th-century technique. The novel is written as a stylization of literary and spoken language of the beginning of the 20th century.
The film “Days of Eclipse” won the “Euro-Oscar” ("Felix Award") of the European Film Academy in November 1988 in West Berlin in the “Best Music” special nomination. In spite of his great success, after 1991 Yuri Khanon never returned to writing music for the cinema.
After 1992 Khanon ceased his public and TV appearances, as well as interviews and concerts, and stopped publishing his music works. Instead he decided, in his own words, “...to work and live in his own company ”. Khanon never participated in any professional organizations and is notable for his independent ideas and reclusive way of life.
In the year 2010, Center of Average Music and the publishing house “Faces of Russia” released another thick work of music history: “Erik Satie, Yuri Khanon. Antedate memories”. The book has a volume of 700 pages and it is not accidentally written in a provocative and free form. It includes all literary works, critical essays, notes and even notebooks of Erik Satie, as well as almost all the letters, more than sixty drawings and all his entire life, from birth to death. This is the first book of Sati on Sati in Russian.
From the very beginning of his career Khanon deliberately evaded calling himself a Composer, a Writer, or an Artist. Creative work is the least important for him, because, according to his ideas, there’s more than enough composers and artists in our world. “It’s impossible to walk down the street without bumping into just another Writer or Composer,” – Khanon ironically wrote in one of his articles in 1993. He viewed his main mission not in creating works of art, but in promotion of certain concepts put to life by the means of art.
