She's a modest figure in frosted white, her stage command at first expressed chiefly in her eloquent right wrist, with its signature trickle of bracelets. And it's quite a stage to command - not just the Arena audience (whose pashminas must have muffled 10% of the sound), but a miniature movie orchestra with strings and electric guitar; a dire background of projected fuchsia blobs resembling an Odeon foyer on a wet Wednesday; and a dance line-up-cum-backing group who writhe in daft get-ups like Maurice Binder's title credits for Bond films.

But it doesn't matter. Asha-ji sings, the air thickens. She is 67, veteran of 12,000 soundtrack songs dubbed over whatever was Bollywood's desirable mouth of the moment. She can sing anything, any way - in a the-story-so-far chat session, she moves unaccompanied through decades and regions of style, gently teasing the jerks of phrasing of formal Indian performers. Later she sings one classical number for real, in a session with a trad dancer in which she provides a river of smooth-flowing mouth music for his fingers and feet.

Her upper register conveys a permanent nubile 17, youthful not through silliness or squeakiness, but enthusiasm - in the dreamy intros of many of her songs you hear a young girl's voice across a misty river at dawn. In her lowest registers she can growl and croon along with Celia Cruz. She does a couple of show-stoppers from 30 years back as full-belt as Shirley Bassey, and an operetta-ish duet with male support so coy it could be Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy cooing to each other round a tree trunk, then responds to a younger male partner with vocal intelligence and a physical rapport expressed in minute checks and balances of movements across the stage. It's very sexy but never absurd: their brains are involved as well as their bodies.

Apart from the occasional brow-mop, she makes it seem no effort at all. An ecstatic night.

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible