Spanish superstar Rosalía reaches for heaven as her tour hits London

At one point during the first UK date of Rosalía's jaw-dropping Lux tour, the Spanish star recalled her childhood ambition of playing a show in London.

"When I was studying music in Barcelona, I always dreamt of singing in one very specific place," she told fans at the O2 Arena, before adding, with perfect comic timing: "And that place is the Royal Albert Hall.

"I would say it constantly to myself," she continued. "The Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall...

"And I never did it. But now I've sold out the O2 twice. God bless London!"

It was a tiny detail in a massive show. But it drove home the unlikely phenomenon of Rosalía's emergence as a global pop star.

She’s a Barcelona-born artist who took her flamenco training and used it to launch a career that seemingly has no boundaries - incorporating everything from opera and classical to hip-hop and mamba, in multiple languages and styles.

Even more unusually, she’s been embraced in the UK, where music fans have been notoriously resistant to Spanish music (or any other music that’s not in English).

In February, she won the Brit Award for best international artist. This week, she’s playing to 40,000 fans in London over two nights at a venue that's four times the size of the Albert Hall.

Those fans turned up wearing lace mantillas and carrying votive candles on Tube trains that buzzed with Spanish slang, as they clamoured for this long-awaited concert.

And from the opening moments, Rosalía delivered, with a show crammed with breathtaking vocals and unforgettable set pieces inspired by religious and secular iconography.

She appeared as the Mona Lisa and an Edwards Degas ballerina. She asked the audience to teach her an English accent, then danced with joyous abandon, and toyed with concepts of devotion, fame and idol worship.

The narrative was inspired by her fourth album, also titled Lux, an exhilarating - and profoundly moving - exploration of the human condition, which asks why the earthly and the holy have to be so far apart.

Accordingly, the 33-year-old presented herself as pure and pristine; or flawed and devilish, as the mood suited.

"I fit in the world / And the world fits into me," she sang on La Yugular. "I contradict myself / I transform," she added on a thunderous version of Saoko, from her second album, Motomami.

And yet, all of her contradictions genuinely make heaven seem with reach, for an hour and a half at least.

The show opened with Rosalía portraying a music box ballerina, her movements restricted, with dancers required to carry her across the stage.

Slowly, she gained agency - dancing en pointe during Porcelana and singing with tear-stained emotion (and astonishing vocal control) on the operatic Mio Cristo Piange Diamante.

By the third act, she was in full swing - downing a glass of wine before performing Sauvignon Blanc, a ballad about renouncing worldly possessions in pursuit of love, before leading the audience in an enthusiastic rave during Cuuuuuuuuuute (complete with a massive incense burner swinging from the ceiling dispensing smoke and strobe lights).

It was all extremely high concept. But Rosalía is too smart and funny to let the theatre get in the way of having fun.

Halfway through the show, she appeared as Mona Lisa, singing Frankie Valli's Can't Take My Eyes Off You to a dozen fans who'd been invited onto the stage.

Then she brought out pop star Lola Young, inviting her into a confessional booth with the hope of eliciting a dark secret.

The English singer obliged with a story about her ex-boyfriend whose phone went off during the middle of a particularly athletic bedroom session.

Rather than shut it off, he left the room and took the call. But unbeknownst to him, his handset was still connected to the Bluetooth speaker.

"And I heard his wife asking him to bring back nappies for his kids."

"What did you do?" asked Rosalía, stunned.

"I lost the plot," Young admitted. "And then I thought, 'I'll go back to [dating] women."

Rosalía used this as a perfect segue into her song La Perla, supposedly about her former fiancé Rauw Alejandro - with lyrics about a "terrorista emocional" whose proudest achievement is his collection of bras.

During the song, her dancers covered her with white gloved hands, transforming her into the Venus De Milo, then a bride, and eventually an angel.

It's the most popular track on Lux, and one of the biggest sing-alongs of the night. Helpfully, Rosalía beams English translations of all her lyrics on a screen above the stage, letting fans follow along.

At the back of the arena, a teleprompter keeps her on track, too - which is fair enough, when her album incorporates 14 different languages and dialects.

Throughout, she's accompanied by the 22-piece Heritage Orchestra, conducted by Yudania Gómez Heredia from a crucifix-shaped stage in the middle of the arena floor.

But despite the classical trappings, this was the loudest concert I've ever experienced at the O2 - not least on a thumping techno remix of Berghain, which the star premiered at this year's Brit Awards.

It would have all been too much for the Royal Albert Hall, for sure... but a stripped-back reconfiguration of this show would make a perfect Prom.

Quick, somebody get Radio 3 on the phone.