Talk about lucky. If Rolando Villazón isn't the hottest tenor in the world right now, he's well on his way. And he's also on his way to Prague, courtesy of the smart folks at panart Productions, who have been trying for a year and a half to secure an open date in his schedule.

But to hear Villazón talk, it's not Prague audiences who are lucky — it's him. "My wife and I visited Prague for the first time in late 2000," he says over the phone from his home in Paris. "It was glorious; we absolutely fell in love with the city. So when they told me there was an opportunity to sing in Prague, I jumped up and said, 'Of course I want to sing there.'"

That would border on disingenuous coming from almost any other singer in the world. But Villazón, 33, is that rarest of opera stars — accomplished and talented enough to have been dubbed "the new Domingo," yet young enough to be modest, accommodating and still, apparently, a little awed by all the attention he's received.

"I don't believe it," he says of the frequent comparisons to Placido Domingo. "There is only one Domingo, and there will be only one in the history of opera. But I can tell you, it's the best compliment anyone can give me."

It's not an entirely specious comparison. When he was 12, long before he had any ambitions of becoming an opera singer, Villazón was given a Domingo recording. "I fell in love with that voice," he recalls. "For six years I listened to it and tried to copy it. So I think there are still some traces of it in my singing."

Trained in his native Mexico and the United States, Villazón has honed his own distinctive style — nuanced yet bold, colorful and romantically rich — but it's easy to see why he's constantly compared to Domingo and other world-class tenors. The voice on his two CDs (Italian Opera Arias and Arias of Gonoud and Massenet) is startlingly mature and strong, almost impossible to imagine coming from his slender frame. Exactly what repertoire will ultimately suit Villazón best remains to be seen, but it takes no more than 10 minutes of listening to realize that he has an exceptional voice with remarkable range and fluidity. With the surging popularity of Latin singers, it's no exaggeration to say that Villazón will be able to do anything he wants to do.

For his visit to Prague, what Villazón plans to do is give the audience a taste of his performances and recordings to date, and a preview of roles to come. The program is a lively mix of bel canto (Donizetti, Verdi) and verismo (Mascagni, Puccini), with some international flavors mixed in — Bizet, Massenet, Tchaikovsky. "I'm singing Lensky's 'Kuda, Kuda,'" he says of the excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. "It's a role I'm going to sing next year. I find this a wonderful, beautiful aria."

Villazón says he approaches all his performances the same way: "I tell myself, this is the most important night of your life. If it's an opera, I concentrate on telling the story. A concert, in contrast, is something more direct with your audience. Ideally, it should be a conversation — a dialogue, not a monologue. The response comes in the form of applause, or sometimes screams, and the energy that you feel from the audience. It's something wonderful."

The program for his Prague debut is lengthy and ambitious, a lot of singing in different genres. Villazón seems momentarily taken aback by what he's committed to, then laughs. "Yeah, but once I'm there, I love to do it," he says. "I'm not one of those people who tries to sing the least, then get my money and everybody goes home. I don't agree with that. I'm lucky to be singing in Prague, and I think and hope this is going to be a very special night for me and for the audience."

There's been some pressure on Villazón to reprise his sizzling performance as Alfredo in La Traviata at this past summer's Salzburg festival. This is the only point on which his enthusiasm dims. "The problem with Traviata is, it has one aria," he says. "It's a nice aria, but I wouldn't use it for a concert. I don't think it should be taken out of the opera."