TAMARA SINYAVSKAYA – OPERNAL QUEEN
Once Tamara Sinyavskaya admitted that she always loved challenging tasks, and fate generously endowed her with them throughout her entire creative life – each new operatic party as a new summit, requiring submission. And there are not enough such peaks for one mountain range.
Tamara Ilyinichna managed to make a dizzying career as an opera singer, deserve the recognition of connoisseurs of vocal skill all over the world, forever inscribe her name in the history of art, becoming a great soloist of the second half of the 20th century.
Concerts in the hallways
Muscovite Tamara Sinyavskaya was born on July 6, 1943. One can only imagine how difficult it was for her mother to feed her child during the hungry war years. Not a single interview with Tamara Ilinichna managed to find information about her father, we only know that she grew up without him. But she loves to talk about her mother, who has dedicated her daughter all her life, endowed with vocal talent and in time brought to the House of Pioneers, so that her daughter demonstrated her abilities in the Song and Dance Ensemble under the guidance of Vladimir Loktev.
As a child, Tamara loved to go into the entrances of old Moscow houses, where there was great acoustics, and to organize real concerts, listening to the sound of her voice. singer Tamara Sinyavskaya. She especially liked to imitate the famous Argentine singer Lolita Torres, whose fame thundered to the whole world then.
The leader of the ensemble appreciated the talent of the student Sinyavskaya and advised her to enter the music school at the Moscow Conservatory after school. At the same time she sang in the choir of the Maly Theater, where she learned the basics of dramatic art. Tamara diligently studied, absorbed opera mastery bit by bit and not only earned the praise of teachers, but received a grade of 5+ at the final exam, which happened very rarely in the school.
Embarrassed debutante
After college, fate brought a 20-year-old girl to a group of interns from the Bolshoi Theater. The vocal data of the young singer impressed the admissions committee so much that they took her even without a conservatory education. The young intern has proved to everyone the right to perform on the stage of an outstanding theater and a year later she was credited to the main team. Then all the famous singers, at the sight of whom Tamara took her breath, overnight became her colleagues on the stage – Galina Vishnevskaya, Irina Arkhipova, Zurab Andzhaparidze, Alexander Ognivtsev.
At first, she was even embarrassed to rehearse with them, she felt embarrassed in front of the masters. Tamara enthusiastically watched the work of great artists, memorized gestures, movements, facial expressions, every sound and change of intonation, the singer Tamara Sinyavskaya at home repeated and repeated what she heard to find her sound. The famous opera director and mentor Boris Pokrovsky helped her overcome herself and open up.
Once, at a time when the main theater troupe was touring in Milan, the singer Olga from the opera Eugene Onegin was urgently needed to find in Moscow. It was a real serious debut of Tamara, which was excellent. This brought her the recognition of colleagues and even more – she was called the best performer of this party. After one of the speeches, the distinguished Sergey Lemeshev said that he had finally met the real Olga.
The brilliant Tamara Sinyavskaya
Reaching the first success, Tamara Sinyavskaya did not calmly rest on her laurels. Every day she improved her skills, broadened her vocal range, and thereby increased her repertoire abilities. In the first few years of her work at the Bolshoi Theater she performed more than a dozen of the parties that became the best in the history of opera art (Konchakovna singer Tamara Sinyavskaya in Prince Igor and Oberon in the opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream). These parties brought her and foreign fame during the tours of the Bolshoi Theater to Canada, France and Japan.
Over the next three years, she received the first three awards of the most prestigious international competitions and festivals – in Sofia, Verviers and Moscow. By the way, at the IV International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the jury’s opinions were equally divided: Soviet jury members cast their votes to Elena Obraztsova, while foreign (including great Maria Callas) equally categorically spoke out for Tamara Sinyavskaya, so the first prize had to be divided between the two singers.
Love with an oriental accent
After such a triumph, an ascending opera diva was spotted by one famous impresario, who telegraphed the theater with a request to let Sinyavskaya go on tour to America. As it is known, the KGB always had its own opinion on this score, and the answer was also standard: “The singer is engaged in repertoire performances”. This means that it is not supposed to hear about any invitations to her.
Who knows what the foreign tours could turn for her, but the trip to Baku for the Decade of Russian culture became a significant one for the singer. There she met singer Tamara Sinyavskaya with Muslim Magomayev. Naturally, she knew the “All-Union Orpheus”, but in absentia.
