Has Peru produced the next Pavarotti?

It would seem that the 21st century has found the first of its great tenors. When Juan Diego Florez finished his solo recital at St John's Smith Square, something akin to pandemonium broke out, as everyone rose to their feet clamouring for more. The elegant young Peruvian, who has already wowed audiences at Covent Garden in Rossini's Otello and La Cenerentola, is now very much a star.

One hopes it won't go to his head, for a certain innocence, a quality of guileless naivety and an unselfconscious ability to communicate the pleasure he takes in singing, are all part of his style and appeal. It could be catastrophic if he started giving himself airs, as tenors are wont to do.

A specialist in the bel canto repertory, he opted for a taxing programme of arias and songs that included the daring and the reputedly impossible. Most tenors junk Almaviva's second act scena from Rossini's The Barber of Seville on the grounds that it is unsingable. Florez closed the first half of his recital with it, spinning out its protracted phrases with an exquisite ease, the coloratura flashing and twinkling with spontaneous accuracy and expressive warmth.

He also chose A Mes Amis from Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment, with its infamous nine top Cs. One was vaguely conscious of a gauntlet being thrown down, for it was Luciano Pavarotti's singing of the aria 35 years ago at Covent Garden that made him famous. Riotously exuberant, Florez sang it in Italian rather than French, the high Cs pinging with thrilling accuracy.

Throughout, it was the liquidity of Florez's voice - the sumptuous ease and swiftness with which it moves and the generous ebb and flow of golden tone - that took your breath away, even when he chose material that avoids the consciously spectacular. He tackled songs by Tosti, infusing them with a limpidity and a passionate intensity that cut away all the usual associations with Victorian stuffiness.

A group of Peruvian songs by Rosa Ayarza de Morales found him exulting in their catchy Afro-Hispanic cross-rhythms and syncopations. During the first of these, When the Turtledove Cries, he suddenly stopped. "I've got lost," he giggled. It is one of those moments in a recital that could cause a singer to lose nerve. "As you know, I should know this song by heart. Do you mind if I start again?" No one did, and his second rendition - complete this time - was different from his first, with an inward, innate stillness replacing mercurial wit and flickering irony. It would be wrong to say the evening was without its flaws. He took a while to warm up, in a couple of Mozart arias in which you were conscious of a lack of warmth in tone during some of his soft singing. His pianist, Vincenzo Scalera, was occasionally heavy-handed and indelicate. None of this ultimately mattered as everyone was swept away by the beauty and the joy of it all.