As one of a number of opera singers who made contributions to the vocal culture of Georgia and the former Soviet Union, Lamara was one of the few women to break through the Iron Curtain.

Her uncle Akaki Chkonia [ka], a writer and a director of the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre, was executed in 1937 during the Great Purge.

At Tbilisi State Conservatoire,[1] she studied with Valerian Cashelli, who had performed at Milan's La Scala and other opera houses in Italy for several years.

[2] Chkonia made many recordings,[8] including 15 CDs (over 250 works) for the "Golden Fund of the USSR" with the National Radio of Moscow, Tbilisi, and Kiev with the participation of the Soviet Union best symphony orchestras.

[2] Chkonia was invited to official state and private solo concerts, where her audiences included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Josip Broz Tito, Indira Gandhi, François Mitterrand, John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Gustáv Husák, Yuri Gagarin, Todor Zhivkov, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceaușescu, János Kádár, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Eduard Shevardnadze.