Her 42nd Street-style Covent Garden debut as Carmen catapulted Aigul Akhmetshina to stardom at 21, but Bizet’s wildcat scarcely begins to exhaust her allure. And to think that she hails from the wilds of Bashkortostan, where she and two siblings grew up with a single mother who left her to play granddad’s accordion, devour psychology books, and swan around playacting in whatever glad rags she could scrounge. “A free bird,” her family called her, and at 14, off she flew to study voice in the Bashkir capital of Ufa. There, in the hometown of Rudolf Nureyev (whose mother gave birth to him on a train bound for Vladivostok—oh, these origin stories!), she kept afloat waitressing, busking on stilts, and dreaming of advanced training at the conservatories of Moscow and St. Petersburg. When she struck out there, the young artists program at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London somehow found her. At age 30, Akhmetshina does her teachers proud; that smoky yet lustrous instrument, her sensual phrasing, and a magnetic stage personality mark her as one in a million. The songlist for her Carnegie Hall debut, with Jonathan Palmer Lakeland on piano, kicks off with Benjamin Britten’s “Tell me the truth about love,” possibly a gender-bent tribute to Carmen (“Some say that love’s a little boy,” it begins, “And some say it’s a bird …”). We’ll hear Jule Styne’s “People” (hello, Barbra!), mixed and matched with Tchaikovsky, Massenet, Kurt Weill, Irving Berlin, and Velázquez—Consuelo Velázquez, that is, she of “Besame mucho.” After the encores, it’s back to the Metropolitan Opera, shears in hand, to rehearse Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila opposite the Met newcomer Clay Hilley. For Akhmetshina, it’s a reunion with the conductor Giacomo Sagripanti, who notched his magnificent company debut pacing her uniquely self-possessed, gorgeously sung Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville (there’s video out there, not to be missed). We can’t wait. —Matthew Gurewitsch

Aigul Akhmetshina performs the role of Dalila in all performances