The diva is in danger. 21st-century opera is about big concepts and hi-tech stagings. Led by the ultra-savvy Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera in New York is using film directors to blast the cobwebs off what was once the world’s fustiest opera factory – and the slick results are being beamed out at their local cinemas. In this brave new world, any soprano who expects the spotlight to cling to her by divine right will soon come unstuck.

Which is all the more reason to celebrate Anna Netrebko. Not because the 36-year-old Russian who will take centre stage at the Last Night of the Proms really is the “next Maria Callas” – the comparison that sits in specious quote marks on her record label’s press pack, and which she duly bats off with barely disguised impatience. But because she is something much more important: a diva in touch with the here and the now.

Like Netrebko, Callas was a stage animal. But Callas also fetishised vocal technique and courted a mystique that was old-fashioned even in the 1960s. “But the whole younger generation of singers is different – thank God,” says Netrebko. “We’re younger, much more open, much more down to earth. And we don’t care so much about watching la voce.” Using the Italian for “the voice”, she mimics exactly the sort of obsessive regard for bel-canto manners that Callas exemplified. It’s almost ridiculously refreshing.

Plenty of airy paragraphs have been composed about Netrebko’s darkly supple soprano. But the truth is that the Netrebko experience is as much about the visuals as it is about the audio. And seeing her strike sparks on stage is much more than simply admiring those “film star” looks that have so fascinated the tabloid press in Germany and Austria; she thrives best in challenging, thought-provoking productions.

British opera fans can be forgiven for letting Netrebko slip off their radar. In Germany and Austria she has been Alist ever since 2005, when she sang La traviata at the Salzburg Festival in Willy Decker’s racy, pacy production. In Los Angeles and Berlin, she played Manon as imagined by Vincent Paterson (the director of Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour) with more than a dash of the Material Girl herself. No surprise that Netrebko looms large in the Met’s future: a standard-bearer for Gelb’s vision of opera as modern entertainment.

In the UK we are still waiting for a knockout punch. In London for a short, illness-hit run in Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, she agrees. “I don’t think I’ve ever done something very special here. But I think my time will come.” Soon, thankfully, comes La traviataat Covent Garden in January; before that, the flag-waving Last Night. “The first half is really serious,” she says, with slight disbelief. “A whole aria from La sonnambula[Bellini], complete with chorus, which they asked me to sing – I hope the audience won’t fall asleep! But the second part will be a little more fun.” Costumes, too?“My dress is going to be Escada – two of them, because I like to change dresses.”

It’s true that Netrebko takes a girlish pleasure in the fashion shoots and sponsorship deals with fashion houses and jewellers (Chopard, blinging off her fingers). “They criticised this one,” she says, gesturing at one of her more airbrushed images in the Deutsche Grammophon clippings book. “And, yes, I know it’s not really me, that it’s a vampy style, but so what? Who said I have to be myself? Maybe next time I’ll be bald.”

Still, fame has its price. “Of course I love to see pictures of me, but there is a lot of very difficult stuff which I have to handle. Lots of opera singers without knowing me already have this wall against me because of the press and a lot of the things they read about me aren’t true.”

Don’t class her as a lightweight. Hearing the story of Netrebko’s rise to success – making herself the youngest and brightest star of Valery Gergiev’s Maryinsky Opera while still in her mid-twenties – you see the gritty determination that underscored her childhood passion to perform. At 16 she left home (the Soviet backwater of Krasnodar) to study in St Petersburg. From there, she shrewdly propelled herself into the fabled court of Tsar Valery through sheer hard graft. “We didn’t have any money, nothing to eat, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke. I concentrated on studying.”

Most famously, she also took a job as a Maryinsky cleaner. “Overused,” she snorts at the anecdote, but it’s still essential back story. “I washed the floors in my first year so I could see everything going on in the theatre. Besides, outside was not nice. 1991 was the worst year in Russia – hunger, cold, disaster – so instead I spent all my days in the theatre, and learnt a lot from those days.”

What made her different from the other singers? “I always knew that I was different. I heard lots of singers who had big voices, which I never had, but my sound was clean.

I had a big range, and I was good on stage. I know what I’m doing there – so you won’t miss me.” When the company began touring outside Russia, few did.

Unlike most from the Gergiev stable, she now manages both to depend on him (“my very, very good friend”) and keep him at arm’s length. She has flats in New York, Vienna and St Petersburg. And, after a difficult break-up with the baritone Simone Alberghini, she has a new significant other. “He’s gorgeous, that’s all I can say – I’m blushing!”

Even more encouragingly, she intends to keep working. “Once you start to think you’re bigger than everybody else, that’s the beginning of the end. If you have sung something very well it doesn’t mean in one month you’ll continue at the same level.” She fires off a final round of street-smart sass. “It’s not like a movie you once did and after that you can go to rehab for three months.” Say hello to the first diva of the DVD era – long may she reign.

The Last Night of the Proms, Sept 8 (www.bbc.co.uk/proms 020-7589 8212) live on BBC Two and One; La traviata opens Jan 14 at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (www.roh.org.uk 020-7304 4000); the compilation album Opera is out on Sept 10 on DG

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