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An appetite for apple pudding

Inevitably it was the prosciutto that Jose Carreras recalled and the handful of apple crumble (pudding) that stuck in London-based producer Harvey Goldsmith’s mind on Thursday, as much as the velvet voice.

Stories abound of Luciano Pavarotti as a larger than life character, a man with a gargantuan appetite for food and fun, who travelled with saucepans and olive oil in his luggage, who cooked pasta for some such as the conductor Sir George Solti, but k ept other dignitaries waiting as he cooked lunch for himself.

Jose Carreras, whose performances with Pavarotti and Placido Domingo as the Three Tenors sold ten million records, on Thursday recalled for a Swedish newspaper a shared love of poker — and food.

“I remember that the last time I was visiting him in Modena, at his home, he was preparing some special bread and tomato for me, together with prosciutto. He was entertaining also in the gastronomic aspect that he liked very much,” he said.

Gubbay remembered a masterclass he staged at the Barbican arts centre in London, in the mid-1980s. “He was big even then, and we’d been warned we had to find him something suitable to sit on, so we’d rushed around hiring this extraordinary collection of thrones and enormous chairs. He walked in and saw them all lined up, laughed uproariously, took out of his holdall a little folding stool, and that was all he used: he never even sat on one of our chairs.”

Harvey Goldsmith, the producer who took him out of the classical music circuit and into arena and open air concerts, said: “He was one of a kind. He was great company, very entertaining, always a twinkle in his eye.

“There was a reception afterwards with a buffet, and as one man had just got his apple crumble and cream dessert, he saw that Pavarotti was about to leave, and rushed over to shake his hand.

“Pavarotti did shake hands but with his free hand he scooped a great handful up of the dessert and ate it. The man was completely overcome, he had shaken hands and his hero had eaten his apple crumble — it was a real double whammy.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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