Ibrahim Ferrer

A happy orphan at home in song

With his white suit and cap, Ibrahim Ferrer always looks as though he's just stepped off his yacht, and so it was when he took the stage, to deafening applause, at the Royal Albert Hall. A marketing man would say the gig was designed to sell copies of Ferrer's new CD, Buenos Hermanos (Good Brothers), but for those in the hall its purpose was to let them come close to their idol. Ferrer's reason - since he doesn't bother with yachts - was just as simple: unexpectedly fished out of shoe-shine-boy obscurity and reborn at 70 as the singing star of Buena Vista Social Club, he wants to savour this second, blazing life to the full. You wouldn't think it to watch him clown about, but he's now 76.

It soon became clear that there had been only the slightest vocal decline over the past six years. He still deployed that cheeky, wide vibrato on the long-held high notes of his bad-boy songs, and he had developed a newly honeyed sound for his trademark boleros. No other Cuban can swing a leisurely song the way he can, or infuse a song of lost love - as he did here to muted trumpets - with such fado-esque creepiness. He had arrived with a 10-man brass section and a posse of percussionists - including, groundbreakingly, a girl - and his distinguished soloists included the bassist Cachaito Lopez. This was the full works.

Well, almost - that peerless prestidigitator Ruben Gonzalez, whose keyboard magic was for many of us Buena Vista's greatest glory, has been forced into final retirement by arthritis, so we got Roberto Fonseca, one of the men vying for his crown. And, in a sweet gesture to the absent maestro, Ferrer had Fonseca deliver one of Gonzalez's favourite numbers. Out came the same arpeggios in the same crashing cascades, but Fonseca hadn't quite got there yet. As if to imbue him with Gonzalez's spirit, Ferrer bent over him at the piano and sang along with his high, hurtling riffs, before going back centre-stage to hurtle along on his own.

When he reached his closing number at 10 o'clock, we suddenly felt short-changed. He did two rousing encores, thanked each member of the band and, like the captain of the ship, was the last to leave.

But then, spotlit like a ghost, he came back, and the real evening began: a succession of increasingly intense goodbyes - a torch song, a lament, a son that got everyone, even those high in the gods, on their feet and swaying in time. He didn't want to go, and we didn't want him to go. He'd given us his whole life on stage - still the 12-year-old orphan, but now a happy one.

Meanwhile, at London's other vast Victorian brick cavern, a very different star was in action, but the maqam singer Farida commanded her musicians with no less authority. Assisted by a spike fiddler, a flautist, a percussionist and virtuosi on the plucked and hammered zithers, she purveyed the music of old Iraq; shadowed by each instrument in turn, she delivered her songs with massive and leisurely imperturbability. The audience wasn't told - perhaps, as most of them were expatriate Iraqis, they didn't need to be told - that this 44-year-old singer has a particular claim to fame, in that the maqam repertoire has traditionally been the preserve of men. She studied under the great oudist Munir Bashir and was a major star in her native land until political pressures drove her into exile. She and her ensemble now operate out of Amsterdam.

In Bath, the night before, she had sung unamplified, but here she was unnecessarily miked. No matter, this occasion was a moving reminder of a grand and ancient tradition, which Bush and Blair, in their cackhanded way, will now presumably help to erase for good.

Ibrahim Ferrer, Royal Albert Hall, London; Farida And The Iraqi Maqam Ensemble, Union Chapel, London