Italy announces Pavarotti commemorations

Italy will mark the death of tenor Luciano Pavarotti with a series of concerts, film screenings, photographic retrospectives and other commemorative events at its cultural centers around the globe, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

The events begin the week of Oct. 6, a month after Pavarotti's death from pancreatic cancer.

They include video clips of Pavarotti interviews screened at the Italian cultural institute in Lima, Peru; concerts in Budapest, Hungary; Copenhagen, Denmark and Lyon, France; a viewing of a "Traviata" performance in Montevideo, Uruguay, and a series of Saturday screenings of Pavarotti operas in New Delhi.

In New York, a photographic exhibition and a series of concerts is planned, while in Seoul, South Korea, the National Opera is planning a commemorative evening, the ministry said in a statement.

The film footage, provided by RAI state television, has been dispatched to 90 Italian cultural institutions around the world "to bring the most important moments of Pavarotti's international career to the largest public possible," the statement said.

Pavarotti, who died at age 71, was beloved by generations of opera-goers and pop fans alike for his breathtaking high Cs, hearty renditions of popular folk songs like "O Sole Mio" and collaborations with pop singers, like Bono, with whom he recorded "Miss Sarajevo" in 1995 to raise money to help rebuild Bosnia.

Over a career spanning four decades, Pavarotti was the best-selling classical artist, with more than 100 million records sold since the 1960s, and he had the first classical album to reach No. 1 on the pop charts.