“To sing Don Giovanni in a concert version is not easy,” the Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, 33, said over lunch. “If you’re only singing, you miss the spirit. You need charisma. You need what comes from acting, from the costumes, the action, the lights. All the things that make a show colorful.”

Mr. Kwiecien has met the challenge before and is poised to do it again at Tanglewood on July 22, when James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra bring Mozart’s black comedy of love and death to the Berkshires for one night only. Opera in concert is a staple there, for good reason. The dramatic masterpieces of a Mozart or a Wagner call for an orchestra of the highest caliber; it’s stimulating repertoire for the instrumentalists, who also enjoy the interaction with the singers. And for summer audiences, which always feature many newcomers to the concert world, the theatrical element adds human interest — and a festive note.

Don Giovanni is Mr. Kwiecien’s calling card right now. Impresarios around the world are booking him as the serial seducer, with engagements in Houston, Seattle, and San Francisco accounting for much of his next season. In related Mozart roles at the Metropolitan Opera — the skirt-chasing Count in “The Marriage of Figaro” and the romantic naïf Guglielmo in “Così fan tutte” — Mr. Kwiecien has shown what he can do. The dark, silken timbre, the class and zing of the phrasing, the unforced yet vivid dramatic presence — the whole package tingles with animal magnetism. Yes, Don Giovanni should be right up his alley.

The things that make a show colorful never hurt, but Mr. Kwiecien can do very well without them. Three seasons ago, in a program on the MET Chamber Ensemble series at Weill Hall, Mr. Levine gave him Ravel’s miniature song cycle “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.” An unknown baritone walked onstage looking every inch the standard-issue “young artist”: bright-eyed,trim, well put together. Then the music began, and there was a star. Gallant, stout of heart, and dreamy, this was the Don Quixote in Don Quixote’s mind — and Mr. Kwiecien had the panache and the Arab-scented melismas for Ravel’s brisk, big finish, too.After a showing like that, you remember the name, even as you wonder how to pronounce it. (Approximate answer: MAH-rih-oos KWEE-chen.)

At age 21, after three years each at the conservatories in his native Krákow and in Warsaw, Mr. Kwiecien made a precocious professional debut in Poland as Mozart’s Figaro. (Moving on to the Count, he has retired the part of Figaro, his servant — but not for reasons of prestige. Figaro’s music is written for a deeper voice — more bass than baritone.) Within three years,he had appeared in Vienna and at the Teatro alla Scala, in Milan. He was 24 when an influential American agent suggested that he come to New York to audition for the Met.

The Met in its wisdom offered Mr. Kwiecien a spot in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. He accepted, at the price of two years’ worth of contracts already in hand.

“I came to America to show that I was ready for anything,” Mr. Kwiecien said. “And I discovered that I wasn’t exactly what I thought. I didn’t have the technique I thought I had. I didn’t have the knowledge of styles. And my English wasn’t good enough to communicate. But I learned. And the Met protected me from singing too much too soon, as well as from roles that would have been too heavy.”

Still, going back to school was not easy. Apart from studying in the bowels of the opera house, the Met’s young artists get drafted for duty in main stage productions, which can make for some long days. “I’m very concentrated and intense in what I do, whether it’s cleaning my apartment, singing, or having sex,” Mr. Kwiecien said. “When there’s a show, I save all my energy all day and give the maximum.” Sometimes he would skip a midmorning German lesson. That did not go over well.

“I’m not only a Scorpio, but very much a Scorpio,” Mr. Kwiecien said. “I can easily cooperate, but I am my own boss, and in the end decisions are my decisions. I didn’t want to be treated as if I had been plucked from the air. Maybe it’s okay when you’re 17 years old to be told what to do. I wasn’t working for the program. The program was supposed to be working for me. But I knew that I had to be flexible. So sometimes I’d give 90 percent instead of 100, whether I liked it or not.”

By last spring, Mr. Kwiecien’s log at the Met totaled 84 performances. The first three dozen, from 1999 to 2003, were in minor parts; but two days after the memorable “Don Quichotte” at Weill came Puccini’s Marcello, in “La Bohème,” a role audiences notice. In March came Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” in which his suave Dr. Malatesta easily held his own in the glamorous company of Anna Netrebko’s Norina and the Ernesto of Juan Diego Flórez.

Between gigs, Mr. Kwiecien likes to get far away; gallery owners are giving premium space to his photographs of destinations like Tibet and Kenya. He is a New Yorker now; from Java Street in the Polish enclave of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, he recently relocated to Trump Place, on Riverside Drive. But he also keeps an apartment back in Kraków, furnished in pieces of his own design — handiwork that has been featured in the pages of shelter magazines.

“If you have talent for one thing, you probably have talent for other things,” Mr. Kwiecien said. “I love to work with my hands.When I had painters in the house, I was never happy. Now, anything that needs painting, I paint myself, and if anything doesn’t suit me, I blame myself.”

Where his principal form of expression is concerned, he gives himself more distance. “I don’t like listening to tapes of my performances,” he said. “Other people listen. I like to sing.”