This Saturday night, German bass René Pape closes out the Metropolitan Opera’s season singing Banquo in Verdi’s “Macbeth,” an interpretation he introduced to New York audiences last week. The following afternoon finds him at Carnegie Hall singing Russian repertory by Mussorgsky with the Met Orchestra led by Valery Gergiev. It’s a characteristically wide arc for this protean artist, who is exceptional by virtue of the beauty of his voice, the finesse of his interpretations, and the commanding figure he cuts onstage. Born in Dresden in 1964, Mr. Pape has been a member of the Staatsopera in Berlin since 1988, and has starred in the world’s great opera houses, including the Met, where he has been a perennial favorite with New York audiences since making his debut there in 1995.

Mr. Pape is acclaimed for the attention he pays to the words that he is singing, whether the language is German, French, or Italian. Singing in Russian is relatively new to him; indeed, since growing up in East Germany, his relationship to Russian culture has truly come full circle. Learning Russian was compulsory at school, “but I didn’t want to learn the language of my ‘enemy,'” Mr. Pape said. Nevertheless, he has retained the ability to read Russian, which naturally helps him today studying that repertory. Singing in Russian, though, is “very hard,” Mr. Pape said. “The consonants, they are not easy because you have 10 ways to pronounce an ‘s’ or an ‘s-c-h.'”

But Mr. Pape now loves singing in Russian and in Russia itself. Maestro Gergiev invited Mr. Pape to make his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 2003, singing Gurnemanz in Wagner’s “Parsifal.” He returned last year for a concert performance of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” which he first performed in Berlin in 2006. He will sing one of the tortured Czar’s monologues on Sunday, as well as Mussorgsky’s “Songs and Dances of Death.”

Next November, Mr. Pape’s long-standing collaboration with Daniel Barenboim, who is music director in Berlin, opens a new chapter when the conductor makes his Met debut conducting “Tristan und Isolde.” Mr. Pape returns to the role of anguished King Marke, in which he made something of a sensation in the 1999 premiere of the Met’s current production. James Levine, another conductor with whom Mr. Pape has developed a close relationship, will conduct Mr. Pape’s performances of the menacing Hunding in “Die Walküre,” and the oversized yet strategically challenged giant Fasolt in “Das Rheingold.” Next April, Mr. Pape will return to Carnegie Hall for his New York solo recital debut.

Mr. Pape has not lacked for crossover opportunities, among them starring in dual roles in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” But he is not entirely pleased with the way opera enters mainstream culture. “Lifestyle magazines just talk about Villazon and Netrebko and their relationship,” he said, referring to the dashing tenor and soprano who are frequently paired onstage as well endlessly speculated about offstage. “This is the most important thing for them.”

Mr. Pape also expressed strong feelings about the state of classical music recordings, saying that record companies have made mistakes in the years since the Three Tenors bonanza of the early 1990s. “They didn’t carry young artists, building their careers like they did in the past. They wanted to make fast money … So now we have the results,” he said. “We need new managements in record companies. New ideas, people more trusting in art.” But he believes that reform and renewal are readily possible. “I’m quite positive. Because it’s not the time to be negative. If you are all negative, then the world would fall apart.”