MOST singers come to interviews in the winded fatigues favoured by rehearsing actors everywhere. Not Anna Netrebko, the Russian soprano appearing next week as Gilda in Covent Garden’s Rigoletto: she’s smart as a button perched on the edge of her sofa in neo-Edwardian Marc Jacobs jacket and jeans.

Netrebko is one of those singers who remind you how rarely genuine talent and beauty go together. She will probably never be the megastar that Angela Gheorghiu is — a question of repertoire (she doesn’t do the big crowd-pleasing Puccinis) and marketing (no Alagna on the scene) as much as vocal quality, which Netrebko has in spades — and in real life she’s rather less full of her own image. When she eventually relaxes (the German press have been after her and she’s a bit nervous), the 33-year-old Netrebko is laughing, cheerful and open — and, unlike with Gheorghiu, I am conscious of not being terrified of the potential volcano waiting to greet the wrong question.

This year she’s singing Gilda till it’s coming out of her ears, and I wonder whether this, plus the fact that her life is minutely booked up for the next four years, isn’t a bit depressing for a party girl who likes to have a life outside opera. “Last year I got a big depression, I wanted to give up singing, nothing was making me happy. But I cancelled a couple of productions and stayed quiet and did nothing — no music, nothing — and now I am enjoying it again.

“Everybody wants a bit of you: agents, record companies, opera houses — it can be a nightmare.”

She cut down on the partying, too — “you can’t sing after dancing all night. I’m getting old! And I can’t afford cracked notes at Covent Garden.”

What about the endlessly repeated repertoire of drippy heroines? “I don’t think Gilda is a stupid victim. That’s not how I sing it. Perhaps because it’s so high for me!” She bursts out laughing again. “She is in love and full of delusion, but that’s how it is. She is the only positive person on stage. Of course, I can’t go on singing the same thing all the time — I’ve done 500,000 Musettas (in La bohème) but stopped now — otherwise you don’t develop.”

Despite having a singer boyfriend — Simone Alberghini, currently in Glyndebourne’s Cenerentola — there is to be no Ange ’n’ Bert Mark 2. “I don’t like singing with him: I worry about him, he worries about me.”

Nor are there any plans for marriage — in fact she makes one of her regular snorting noises when I mention it. As she does when I bring up the internet rumour of her pregnancy. “Bah, bull****!” she explodes. “Did they say from who?” More hilarity when I suggest her Svengali, Valery Gergiev. “But he is old man! . . . I don’t know, maybe in Germany I had too much to eat and someone took a photo of my profile. It was German food!”

The recent Classical Brit Awards, where she performed, arouse more magnificent disdain. “You know who won first prize? Katherine Jenkins!Excuse me, this is not real. Classical music should be more serious.” We discuss la Jenkins’s attributes. “Yeah, nice boobs,” says Netrebko enigmatically. But she’s not bitchy.

Her own story is romantic enough. She came to Petersburg from Krasnodar — “a normal, boring, Soviet childhood” — at the age of 16. She attended music college and conservatoire (“I didn’t finish anything: I don’t have a diploma!”), during which she skivvied at the Maryinsky Theatre, mopping floors while living in bleak digs. Then she won the Glinka singing competition, auditioned for the part of Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro and got the rather bigger part of Susanna. That was in 1994, at an age when most British singers are barely out of nappies. Luckily for her, Gergiev was rejuvenating the company and fixed on her as a likely prima donna.

Perhaps the biggest break was her Donna Anna at Salzburg in 2002 — a part usually sung by much older, heavier voices, and a performance that I saw: extraordinary to see this waif-like creature singing that big music. “It was Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s idea to make Anna young and fragile,” she recalls. In real life she’s taller than she seemed on that stage — a testimony to how vulnerably well she played the part — and I remember vividly the combination of stage presence and startlingly large, beautiful, rounded voice coming out.

Now it is mostly Donizetti, Bellini and lighter Verdi, pure bel canto. Nothing Russian (“not right for my voice”), nothing heavy: she is developing her coloratura skills and rolls her eyes at the thought of some of the parts she’ll be singing. “Bellini — well, the stories are all . . . pffff!” she snorts. “So old-fashioned — you really have to work hard to make them understandable.”

After Gilda she’s got a new Salzburg production of La traviata (“Willy Decker is producing . . . at least he’s promised not to shave me!” she says of the controversial German director) and in the autumn another Gilda in Doris Dörrie’s infamous Planet of the Apes production in Munich.

“Monterone is an orangutan, Duke is a gorilla. Only Gilda is human. You think this is cool?” She gives me an old-fashioned look: underneath it all is a good Soviet girl who gave up ideas of an acting career for singing for the best reason — “because it’s really difficult.”

• Rigoletto opens at Covent Garden (020-7304 4000) tonight and runs until July 13

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