There will be a new Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Luciano Pavarotti, who died in 2007 at 71.
The laying ceremony will be on 24 August 2022 at 11.30 am (Los Angeles time) at 7065 Hollywood Boulevard and will be transmitted live on walkoffame.com. The tenor's daughter Cristina Pavarotti will be present to receive the award, also on behalf of the other heirs Lorenza, Giuliana and Alice Pavarotti and Nicoletta Mantovani, and will speak together with the conductor James Conlon, Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera.
The ceremony will be accompanied by a series of events called “Luciano Pavarotti – the Star” on 24 and 25 August in California, with support of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Emilia-Romagna Region, the cities of Modena and Pesaro, and the Rossini Opera Festival, among others.
Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem will be projected with the RAI Rome Symphony Orchestra and the RAI Milan and Rome Choruses conducted by Claudio Abbado in the Basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome in 1970, restored for the occasion by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. The singers were Renata Scotto, Marilyn Horne, Pavarotti and Nicolai Ghiaurov. On 24 August in Italy – the day that the star will be positioned – Rai Cultura will transmit the 1970 Requiem. Another video tribute in Los Angeles will be of five pieces from the last of the three recitals that Pavarotti gave as soloist at La Scala in 1983. A new short documentary by Gianluigi Toccafondo – called “Luciano Pavarotti, la Stella” – about the singer will also be shown.
An exhibition space dedicated to Luciano Pavarotti will open at the Grammy Museum on the morning of 25 August. Among the exhibits will be the score of Verdi's Messa da Requiem used by the tenor for his debut in the work in 1967 at La Scala conducted by Herbert von Karajan, in which he collected phrases and autographs of many of the conductors with whom he subsequently interpreted it over the course of thirty years.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
