He also performed at Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and gave further concerts in Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago, and made an appearance on Jay Leno’s first installment of The Tonight Show. Then Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani gave him the Crystal Apple award. His seventh album Sacred Arias, which contains exclusively sacred music, was released worldwide on 8 November, and two weeks later reached number one on the US Classic Billboard charts – making Bocelli the first vocalist to hold all top three places on the chart, with Aria, the opera album in second place, and Viaggio Italiano in third place. The album also included the hymn of the Holy Year 2000 which was chosen as the official version by the Vatican in October. At the 42nd Grammy Awards, Bocelli was nominated twice. “The Prayer” was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals and for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Bocelli performed it with Dion at the ceremony. His “World Tour 2000” started on 31 March. In May, his Sacred Arias album was voted album of the year by listeners of the Classic FM radio station in the UK. His world tour continued from 12 to 14 May with four concerts in Japan and South Korea. At the end of the UEFA European Football Championship, he performed with Valery Gergiev and Renee Fleming at a concert on the River Maas in Rotterdam. On 6 July, he performed at the Statue of Liberty in New York City for his third PBS special American Dream: Andrea Bocelli’s Statue Of Liberty Concert. The concert was a dedication to his father, who died in the beginning of 2000. He was accompanied by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Steven Mercurio with special guest Soprano Ana Maria Martinez and a surprise appearance by Sarah Brightman to sing with Bocelli on “Time to Say Goodbye”. For the final encore, he dedicated “Sogno” to his late Father. On 17 August, he performed in Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem at the Verona Arena in Rome.
His seventh album, Verdi, was released on 11 September. In September, he performed three concerts in Australia. He received another Echo Klassik award for “Bestseller of the year” for Sacred Arias. In November, his first complete opera recording, La Boheme, was released. In December, he received another award in Germany, the Goldene Europa for classical music.In January 2001, Bocelli portrayed the main character in Mascagni’s opera L’amico Fritz at the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona and again performed the tenor part in Verdi’s Requiem. On 19 March, the Requiem album was released with Bocelli as tenor. From 22 March to 6 April, he toured North America accompanied by Cecilia Gasdia and the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. On 17 June, he performed at the re-opening of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In July, he performed two concerts in Dublin with Ana María Martínez and the New Symphony Orchestra. At the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice on 4 October, he presented his new album Cieli di Toscana and was recognised for having sold more than 40 million albums worldwide. In October, he opened the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sicilian opera composer Vincenzo Bellini in Catania. On 28 October, he sang Franz Schubert’s Ellens dritter Gesang (also known as “Ave Maria”, Latin for “Hail Mary”) as a representative of the Roman Catholic faith, during a memorial concert at Ground Zero in New York City for the victims of the September 11 attacks there. In November, he received the Platinum Europe Award for one million sales of the album Cieli di Toscana, and at the Italian Music Awards he was given a special award from the Federation of the Italian Music Industry for his merits as an “Ambassador of Italian music in the world”. He performed seven more concerts in the US accompanied by Ana María Martínez, and on 23 December, he sang the Italian national anthem as well as works of Bellini and Verdi at the traditional Christmas concert in the Italian Senate, which was broadcast live on television for the first time.
[10/15, 22:27] SKILL INDIA: Will Ferrell
John William Ferrell is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer. Ferrell is known for his leading man roles in comedy films and for his work as a television producer. He has earned four Emmy Awards and in 2011 was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Ferrell first established himself in the mid-1990s as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, where he performed from 1995 to 2002, and has subsequently starred in a string of comedy films. Ferrell is considered a member of the “Frat Pack”, a generation of leading Hollywood comic actors who emerged in the late 1990s and the 2000s, including Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Paul Rudd, and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson. He founded the comedy website Funny or Die in 2007 with his former writing partner Adam McKay.
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