The Shagreen Bone

At the beginning of 1991, negotiations also took place about staging the ballet and intermission opera “The Chagrin Bone” in the Kirov Theater.

[2] In 1992, an avant-garde film-opera The Shagreen Bone was shot at the Saint Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, with Yuri Khanon in the main role.

On the first page of the full score the imperishable words shine: ″To Erik Satie, my father, comrade, communist″.

As the baritone informs, the spectators can "go for a walk and have some meat" while on the stage there is a veristic performance depicting the relationship between the lovers.

[7] Despite of eclectic and spreading, novel "Shagreen Skin" is a very constructive composition: the whole structure is described by one line of successive decreasing of life.

<...> It pleases how carelessly the story is written, everywhere feels how Balzac hurried up..., under the pressure of his creditors the writer made his violent activity so intensive that caught a nervous exhaustion.

[9] As composer and librettist in one, Khanon created a complete spectacle, a compressed version, a sort of extract of the formal ballet language.

[10]: 3 A frequently asked question: How could such a dramatic transformation occur when the skin of a shagreen, “the hide of a wild donkey,” turned into “bones”?

In the novel Vanière, the gardener of monsieur Raphael de Valanten, examines with surprise a shagreen he found in a well and says: "dry as wood and not greasy at all."

The composer seems to rise from the orchestra pit and throw bones in the face of the audience, that is to say, ballet clichés: grand pas, fouettés, variations, adagios.