WE heard it before, haven't we? The new Pavarotti. The new Domingo. The best since Caruso. The greatest thing sliced bread. Every so often tenor nobody has ever heard of materialises out of nowhere, glows, twinkles, lights up the operatic skies. Some last, some don't. Most can't seem to stand the heat generated by their own burst of stardom.

But one who has coolly been making progress over the past three years is the young Argentinian tenor Jose Cura. Though he has just received - for his performance as the eponymous hero in Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalila at the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden - yet another batch of red hot reviews, Cura is all too aware of the possibility of burn out, and has decided it's not for him.

"There's a lot of noise around me and around my great promise and blah, blah and blah," he says, unceremoniously. "Of course I like this and am flattered about it - you would not be an artist if you didn't have some vanity - but I don't want to precipitate anything."

"I want to learn my job, to be myself, to show everybody what I can give - and what I cannot give. There are two ways to arrive at the top of a hill. You can be put there by a helicopter, and whoosh! The first wind that comes along whips you down. Or you can arrive at the top by yourself, making muscles as you go along, so that when you get there you are strong. That doesn't mean you are invulnerable, but at least you are stronger.

Strength, strangely enough, is one of the onstage qualities most often attributed to Jose Cura by the critics strong voice strong personality, strong physique. In person it is equally apt. He bestrides the lunch time rush hour at Covent Garden's frazzled stage door like a Colossus, appearing precisely on time, radiating warmth and charm, answering questions with a laid back ease which belies the fact that he is squeezing an interview into an already crowded rehearsal schedule.

Yet it is something of a miracle that Jose Cura ever ended up on an opera stage at all. Born into a musical family in Rosario, he started taking piano lessons when he was seven, only to be told by his teacher that he had no talent and should give up the instrument. He switched to classical guitar, but didn't make much headway with that either. At which point most people would probably dust off the stamp collection instead, he took up conducting. Conducting? He smiles a mischievous smile, shrugs a graceful Latin shrug.

"I made my debut as a conductor when I was 15. It was a good occasion, an open air conceit in Rosario. I was just a musician - it was normal and spontaneous to be, organising, the show. I didn't think about it. I just did it, and I enjoyed it. Then I began thinking maybe, I'd like to be a professional musician, so I started to study composition and conducting seriously at the conservatoire.

THROUGH his involvement with choral conducting Cura was encouraged to take up vocal studies and won a scholarship to study singing at the School of Arts at the prestigious Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Was that the beginning of a prestigious solo career? Was it heck. Incorrect teaching damaged his voice and he was forced, yet again, to change tack. It he were to harbour murderous intentions towards that wretched teacher it would be understandable, but he writes the experience off as something of an occupational hazard.

"Ninety nine per cent of singers have problems with this," he says, with another of those `what's to be done?' shrugs. Then he grins broadly, fiddles with the lace of his right sneaker, which is balanced on his left knee as he lounges on the sofa of the conductor's room at Covent Garden, and delivers one of the duly ironic broadsides which occasionally emerge, with unexpected force, from his charmingly accented English.

"There are a lot of... smoke sellers - I don't know the word in English - bullshit-sellers perhaps, all over the world who say they are singing teachers.

Back in Argentina he persevered with his choir and eventually, in 1988, his moment came. He was due to conduct an opera gala the tenor cancelled at short notice Cura stepped in and the rest, so far, has been, happy ever after. His stage debut in Verona in 1992 was swiftly followed by dates of increasingly glamorous hue; Nabucco in Genoa with Ghena Dimitrova and Leo Nucci, La forza del destino with Aprile Millo, Tosca at the Puccini festival in Torre del Lago, another Nabucco at the Bastille in Paris - and, of course, the roles which have endeared him to the British opera going public, the title role in Verdi's Stiffelio and Samson in Saint Saens's Biblical epic. In the middle of all that, he won the Placido Domingo competition, Operalia, in 1994.

It has been, on the whole, a very focused career, perhaps because he knew which roles would suit him pretty much from the beginning. "Verdi and Puccini," he says without hesitation. "Dramatic roles, not only in the sense of quantity, of sound, because everybody thinks `ah, dramatic is to shout' but it's to do with the intensity of the roles, the intensity of the opera. I need to be intense on stage. There's no point in putting me there just to sing beautiful notes. I can't. I get absolutely bored - so that's why I try to refuse operas where I cannot really act, suffer on stage, cry if I have to cry.

All those piano lessons paid off, too, for he can study new roles by himself - which, he says, represents not only a huge saving of time and money but also gives him greater freedom of interpretation.

"It's a good thing for me because I'm really the owner of my character - I create it myself. You can like it or not like it, you might not agree with it, but you can never say I'm copying or picking things from other people. I'm just being myself."

IT'S an approach he admits is "difficult and dangerous"; but it has won him both critical and popular acclaim. This he modestly attributes to the fact that he gives himself totally to the performance.

"I go out and give my best on stage, and I think people can feel that - like any human being, I make mistakes here and there. But you never see me on stage not really giving myself. That's why people react to my performances."

There was certainly plenty of reaction when, in his recent run of Covent Garden performances as Samson, Cura brought the house down - literally - going at the temple in a manner reminiscent, according to one critic, of Sylvester Stallone and, at one point, revealing rather more of his manly flanks than the designer of the skimpy slave costumes intended. Many a tenor's dignity would be affronted by the mere mention of the incident, but Cura bubbles over with laughter.

"I loved doing Samson," he says. "Somebody said here they never saw a leading tenor take so many risks as I did, because I kicked and fought, pulled everything down. They're still talking about my legs and my ass. But I didn't show my ass on purpose - it was natural. I mean, if you're a slave and you're being tortured, you're not going to worry about your outfit or wear black tie or something, are you?"