12 July Birthday of People's Artist Valentina Tolkunova. Part 1
Valentina Tolkunova began her professional career as a singer with jazz, working in the VIO-66 ensemble under the direction of composer Yuri Saulsky. The depth and freedom of performing jazz music helped to open up and strengthen the singer's skills. And the leader and conductor of the ensemble became her first love …
Valentina, Valechka, Valyusha Tolkunova have always been considered the soul of Russian song and the crystal voice of the Soviet stage. Valentina Vasilievna was a woman who loved music, lived by it, sang for everyone and everyone, collecting sold out until the very last concert in February 2010, when a medical team was already waiting behind the scenes to take the singer off the stage, this time forever.
Childhood and youth
Valentina Vasilievna Tolkunova was born on July 12, 1946 in the city of Armavir, Krasnodar Territory. But soon the parents moved to Moscow, where the singer lived all her life and always considered herself a Muscovite.
In the family of the military railway worker Vasily Tolkunov and his wife Yevgenia, they always listened to folk songs and sang romances with a guitar. Vali's mother, Evgenia Nikolaevna, has always been madly in love with singing. She accompanied any of her housework with singing. With the very first little money that appeared, I bought a turntable and records. The family of toys had only one rubber baby doll for two children, but the voices of Utesov, Shulzhenko and Bernes were constantly heard.
Valina's mother, due to the circumstances, could not make music herself, but she devoted her whole life so that her daughter could fulfill this dream. She probably did not even suspect that nature itself took care of this. The task of the mother was to love her little girl and correctly develop her innate talents.
And Valyusha developed in love and attention. Even what seemed strange to the parents was perceived with a warm smile. From the age of ten, Valya loved to put on a long grandmother's skirt and tie some beautiful ribbons to her then not very long hair to go down her shoulders. And necessarily - mom's shoes, even though they fell off her feet, but Valya insisted that women's shoes should certainly be heels.
Then, at the age of ten, Valya was invited to the choir of the Central House of Railway Workers, in which she sang enthusiastically until graduation. As an adult, Valentina studied a lot, continuing to improve her vocal abilities under the guidance of experienced teachers. She graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Culture and the Gnessin School of Music.
Valentina Tolkunova began her career on stage with jazz. She wrote music for several songs; her repertoire includes romances, comic songs, and poems. People's Artist Tolkunova always participated in the work of charitable foundations, gave free concerts, and her reflections on life and work made up a rather voluminous book.
Valentina Tolkunova led the collective of the Moscow Theater of Musical Drama and Song, the idea of creating which belonged to her, tried herself in dramatic images of musical operas, sang in different genres and selected a repertoire that helped her to open up, first of all, as an artist.
Realizing, feeling what her viewer needed, Valentina Tolkunova, as befits a developed skin-visual muse, brought high culture to the masses. Her productions were very popular and famous.
Muse
And yet, the singer's widely entrenched image does not give a complete picture of her. To fully understand such a phenomenon as singing Valentina Tolkunova, you need to understand the forces that moved her, the innate qualities of her psyche, her natural desires.
From time immemorial and at all times in human society there are special people - those who, with their singing, unite human souls into one whole and direct them in a single direction. Folk singers are women who have been given the ability from God to influence the human psyche with their voice. For what? To preserve the human appearance.
Human consciousness is fragmented, exists in the separate heads of millions of people, and each thinks about his own. But in the life of nations there are times when people must unite for survival: natural disasters, enemy invasions, global catastrophes, after which it is necessary to establish a normal life. And in all these cases, a person is helped, surprisingly, by a song, the words and motive of which are perceived equally by everyone.
Therefore, people have always held in high esteem and will be a person who sings. During the war, the "special woman", born by nature to the skin-visual, supported the warriors with her singing, raised their fighting spirit and inspired them to fight the enemy. And after the end of the battle, she, on the contrary, calmed the men excited by the war, lulling their minds heated up by the battle, singing lingering mournful songs, sad steppe tunes.
Nothing has changed in the modern world. The form changes, but the essence remains the same. And therefore, special women, endowed with the natural gift of folk singers, continue to be born on earth. Valentina Tolkunova undoubtedly belongs to this unique phenomenon.
It was impossible to take your eyes off this skin-visual beauty when she sang! Like a "white swan" this woman swam across the stage, charming the audience. Love shone in my eyes, every gesture was full of affection. As the owner of the visual vector, she was naturally endowed with the greatest emotional amplitude, the peak of which is love. And Valentina Tolkunova generously shared this love and her natural talent with the audience.
The performance of the skin-visual singer always carries a deep psychological meaning and, penetrating deeply into the subconscious of everyone, directly affects our collective unconscious, either calling to defend the Motherland, then returning to a peaceful life at the hearth.
As in the days of the Great Patriotic War, the groovy singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko, with her songs, raised the soldiers to fight for the Motherland with her songs, so, after a while, the people's artist Valentina Tolkunova with her gentle voice and all her correct appearance calmed the psyche of people, reminded them of home, family, children and the simple joys of a peaceful life.
By the way, at a concert in 1972, where Valentina Tolkunova performed with her first solo number, both of these women - great folk singers - symbolically crossed on the same stage, as if passing the baton of a kind of musical preservation of the Russian people and Russia.
Like this? - you ask. Yes, like that. Once, at one of the concerts, the lights suddenly went out. In complete darkness, without seeing or hearing anything, the audience began to worry, this excitement threatened to turn into mass hysteria and a death crush. It was necessary to somehow calm the audience down, and the director of the concert makes a strong-willed decision: "Call Valentina Vasilyevna Tolkunova, she will calm them down!"
Singer Tatyana Ostryagina recalls how Tolkunova's calm voice was heard from the dressing room in the midst of the general turmoil: "I'm going now!" With a weak candlelight illumination, the singer walked onto the stage and began to sing in the pitch darkness.
“In absolute darkness, she begins to sing,” Tatyana Ostryagina says with delight. - Acapella, unaccompanied. And the hall freezes. Freezes as one and only person. I have not heard such silence even at the Bolshoi Theater."
This is how it works in life: a developed skin-visual woman alone can soothe many thousands of halls with her singing alone.
The beginning of the creative path
Valentina was a singer in the Russian style, but at the same time, modern. Her whole image perfectly matched the reality of that time. In one interview, Tolkunov was asked:
- Are you very different in life from that gentle, light and feminine image that we see on stage?
- I would really like to be always in the state in which I am on stage. In life I would like to. This is a state of complete detachment and sublimity, spirituality, which is lost when you leave the stage, and which gives you the right to speak sometimes with people in a sublime language. You can talk to them through a song, through some interesting images, through a musical phrase that penetrates the human world, but in life you are an ordinary person who changes from a secular dress of queens into ordinary trousers, a suit and ceases to feel himself in this sublime condition.
Valentina Tolkunova was a strong personality, she always chose her repertoire and her life path herself. In everyday life, Valentina was an active, business woman, she loved to drive in her jeep, she completely provided for her family. But she always regretted that her personal life was less successful than her career.
Valentina Tolkunova began her professional career as a singer with jazz, working in the VIO-66 ensemble under the direction of composer Yuri Saulsky. The depth and freedom of performing jazz music helped to open up and strengthen the singer's skills. And the leader and conductor of the ensemble became her first love. Saulsky was captivated by the talent and beauty of the young performer and, although he was eighteen years older than her, a couple of months after they met, he made a marriage proposal.
In her first marriage, Valentina Tolkunova lived for five years, constantly touring and improving her performing talent, although for this she had to interrupt her studies at the Institute of Culture, which she graduated later. And then Gnesinka, after the divorce from her first husband.
At the age of 25, after breaking up with her husband and leaving the jazz ensemble, Valentina dramatically matured. But when the bitterness and pain passed, the girl was able to understand everything, forgive and carry warm and friendly relations through life. Tolkunova said that Yuri Saulsky can have as many women as he wants, but his main love is music.
But then, in 1971, Valentina Tolkunova found herself alone, without support, without work, without money. But with the obligation to pay monthly fees for the cooperative apartment. It was then that the cutaneous vector in her psychic switched over the control of her life.
Using her natural organizational talent, inherent in the skin vector, Valentina has created a musical quartet with which she has dubbed films with a wide variety of repertoires.
Perhaps thanks to this, she subsequently made her film debut with the musical film "I Believe in the Rainbow".
But her voice - crystal and soulful - became familiar and beloved for the wide audience after the release of the feature film "Day by Day", where she sang the epoch-making song "I'm Standing at a Half-Stop".
The singer herself believed that her real creative birth took place with the performance of the song "Silver Weddings", when her path began to a lyrical, heartfelt Russian song.
So, in the early seventies, a bright star of a new Russian singer, a popular favorite, Valentina Tolkunova, began to rise.
Part 2
