Since racking up rave reviews as the lovesick Rodolfo in Puccini's sold-out La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera in New York last year, the darkly handsome, wildly flirtatious Italian-born tenor Vittorio Grogolo has been jetting from New York to sold-out performances in Milan and London, recording a thid solo album (this month's Arrivederci), and preparing to make his highly anticipated West Coast operatic debut in Romeo and Juliet, directed by Plácido Domingo, at the L.A.

“Most of my own eyes and ears went with Grigolo, partly because of his sheer energy. This was a rejuvenated Faust whom you could believe in…..but the commitment, strength and vocal mobility that made him last year’s Covent Garden wow in Manon still rang through the house”

NEW YORK — When the rising opera star Vittorio Grigolo was a child prodigy, a very famous man gave him some sound advice.

"This is what Pavarotti said to me," Grigolo, now 33, says. "'Charisma is something you either have or you don't.' He said that you can learn to sing better, but that sense of energy is something you can't be taught."

It is a few hours before the curtain rises on Puccini’s La Bohème now at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and 33-year-old Vittorio Grigolo, the handsome, increasingly prominent face of international opera can be found resting in a stuffy, decidedly drab dressing room tucked in the basement of Lincoln Center. Making my way through the confounding labyrinth of tunnels before ending up outside his door—assistants are bustling up the corridor, a piano is playing in the distance, somebody is practicing scales, and the air, quite suddenly, smells thickly of an intoxicating cologne.

The Metropolitan Opera has not had a season without La Bohème, since 1997-98, which must give Franco Zeffirelli’s production a status in the opera world not unlike Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap in London theater. Inevitably, casts have had their ups and downs, but last year’s, headed by Anna Netrebko and Piotr Beczala, may well have been the finest the production’s lavish sets have yet accommodated.