Regina Spektor — anti-folk heroine, Russian émigré and all-round oddball — headlined the first night of the Serpentine Sessions, the three-day musical extravaganza in Hyde Park.

Coming to the capital on the back of a triumphant performance at Glastonbury, the New York resident must be feeling at home in Blighty. As she walked onto the stage in a floral dress and sat at the piano, last night’s crowd were certainly ready to embrace her as one of their own.

Quite right, too. Spektor is a singular talent with a charmingly bonkers worldview and uniquely expressive voice, which spanned everything from little-girl kookiness to the near operatic.

Basing the majority of her set around her excellent new album, Far, the singer-songwriter was joined by a drummer, cellist and violinist.

Pizzicato strings gave Folding Chair an offbeat quirkiness; a shuffle beat gave One More Time With Feeling the necessary bounce; and Spektor’s quasi-classical piano-playing gave Machine a sense of grandeur.

Elsewhere, Blue Lips echoed Suzanne Vega’s Small Blue Thing, with Spektor cooling the incredibly hot tent with the icy refrain: “Blue is the most human colour.”

It’s Spektor’s warm heart, however, that’s most appealing. With a smile that splits her face, the frizzy-haired singer fills her songs with playfulness and wide-eyed wonder.

New single, Laughing With, pondered over the nature of God “as a genie who does magic like Houdini”. Elsewhere, That Time reminisced on the routine teenage activities of smoking rollies, reading Shakespeare and, er, rescuing pigeons.

Spektor is capable of more than mere kookiness, however. A moving encore of Samson, which she performed solo at the piano, proved she’s just as effective at breaking hearts as tickling ribs. Funny, thoughtful and thoroughly original. Spektor is special indeed.