Museum Monday 2026/19

 

detail of the cheekpiece of a horse bridle in the form of a mythical creature, worked in bronze in what is now Iran in approximately 800-700 BCE, now at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2026/15

 

detail of Bamboo by Yoshida Zōtaku, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2026/10

 

detail of The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara of the Six Syllables, an eighteenth-century silk hanging now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2026/1

 

detail of Hashi-Benkei (Benkei on the Bridge), a woodblock print by Tsukioka Kogyo from the series One Hundred plays of the Noh Theater (Nogaku kyakuban), seen at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2025/47

 

Oroshi (Mountain Gust) by Kino Satoshi, on view as part of New Japanese Clay at the Asian Art Museum

Museum Monday 2025/30

 

detail of a Ming Dynasty vase showing scholars going to a gathering, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2025/22

 

detail of Birds and flowers by Oki Ichiga, now at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2025/11

 

detail of Crows in Snow, part of a screen painted by an unknown Edo-period Japanese artist, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2024/33

 

detail of a hanbok (birthday dress) from late 20th century Korea, now at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Museum Monday 2024/23

 

detail of Standing Crowned Buddha with Four Scenes of his Life, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday photo 2014/50

detail of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Chinese: Guanyin), Ming (1368 - 1644) or Qing (1644 - 1911) Dynasty, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

the writing on the wall

The Asian Art Museum currently has an exhibit of Chinese calligraphy I had been looking forward to. It's the sort of show that would repay close attention and frequent visits, which is exactly what it's not going to get from me, because the museum has once again curtailed its Thursday night late hours. Those are easily the best viewing hours for working people; without them I'd have to make a special trip in to San Francisco on a weekend, and my weekends are already packed, as is the museum on weekends.

It seems to me that in previous years it was only during November and December that the museum didn't have Thursday late hours. This year it's October as well. I had always figured Thursday concerts in Civic Center would work for me because I could go to the museum beforehand and not feel that the hours after work were being completely wasted by the local insistence on outmoded 8:00 start times during the work week. But now the museum has removed that justification by shutting down for all practical working-stiff purposes for three of the prime concert-going months. And during the rest of the year the museum frequently ruins the late-hours experience with stupid obnoxious parties (see here and here) or boots out members for the convenience of various corporations and their events.

I had planned to go to the museum before a Thursday night concert the first week of October. Something made me check the website that afternoon, but for reasons I don't remember (maybe contradictory information, or maybe just habitual caution and mistrust) I ended up phoning to check on the hours. I kept getting recordings that didn't tell me anything I needed to know, so I ended up calling the gift shop, the only number I could find likely to be answered by a human being. A very nice woman there told me that the museum was indeed now closed Thursday nights for three months starting in October but would be open late just that one day for a special event although members would be allowed in. I didn't think to ask if the Cafe would also be open. It wasn't, except for a few prepackaged and fairly sad-looking sandwiches and salads. Normally the Cafe is very appealing, so this was a disappointment. I was on my way to a concert at Herbst Theater, did some rapid logistical calculations, and realized I'd better go find a place to eat instead of contemplating calligraphy. So I had about a fifteen-minute walk-through of the exhibit, and instead of waxing rhapsodic about it here I will instead wonder why the Asian Art Museum is so bent on inconveniencing patrons, especially those who work. If the museum is that short of money, why not shut down another day during the week and keep the late hours to accommodate those who can most conveniently visit then?.Why not reach out to concert-goers at the Opera House, Symphony Hall, and Herbst, and sell themselves as a pre-concert destination? This seems like a case of facing difficulties by retreating into what is already not working that well. Times of crisis should be times of innovation, people!

I have to work to support myself, but I also have a foolish need to experience art. Adding to my irritation at the museum is my general dislike of being made to feel like Jude the Obscure.

At the concert I ran into a friend and I mentioned I was about ready to drop my membership in the Asian Art Museum, since their curtailed hours and stupid parties were making it increasingly useless to me. He told me if I did that I should at least donate money to support them. (My membership is pretty much turning into a straight donation anyway since I'm getting less and less use out of it.) I said I didn't really see the point of that. My limited funds can go elsewhere. Then I asked him if he had a membership or donated money to the museum himself. "Oh, no," he replied.

we have always lived in the castle

Continuing my trip backwards through the San Francisco Symphony centennial season. . . .

My second-to-the-last Symphony concert of the centennial season (Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle) was just a week before the finale. I did not realize it at the time but - music aside, since in that regard both evenings were wonderful - it was going to be a complete contrast as an experience to the final concert, which was a nightmare: I write about that concert, quite entertainingly I must say - that's me, spinning my straw into gold! - here.

Back to my penultimate week. It was Thursday night so the Asian Art Museum was open late and fortunately hadn't scheduled anything that would sabotage the experience for people who were actually interested in Asian art, so I had the pleasure of meeting Lisa there for dinner and a look around the galleries. The Phantoms of Asia exhibit was spread over the whole building, though we ended up spending most of our time on the top floor, in the Indian galleries. I thought there was an intriguing idea behind Phantoms of Asia - asking contemporary artists to react to the various Asian traditions and beliefs around spirituality, the afterlife, and cosmic order - but despite a few striking pieces I found the older works on display much more interesting. Perhaps if I had been able to pay more than two fairly brief visits to the show I would have felt differently.

Anyway, on to Symphony Hall. The program opened with Jeremy Denk playing the Liszt, which seemed like luxury casting. Liszt often gets paired with Bartok, I guess because they're both Hungarian, though there is also the entertaining contrast between the former's heavenly rhapsodies (edging into that sort of ethereal spirituality which always seems really sexual) and the latter's more astringent and earthy sound. The Piano Concerto No. 1 is fairly short (about twenty minutes) with a cascading dazzle of sound that for me evoked heavy rain falling through leaves onto a window pane - and then persistently BEEP BEEP BEEP and what the hell is that? I half expected Tilson Thomas to stop the performance and wheel around like a hawk, only it didn't seem to be a device in the hall (and apparently people further back couldn't hear it at all). I think it was something - an exit or a smoke detector or wahtever- in the hall outside the auditorium. Too bad. This was one of the better audiences I've experienced in Davies (no one around me was talking, texting, unwrapping cellophane, flipping noisily through the program, kicking the back of my seat, or squeezing me in so I couldn't breathe) - how perverse of the cosmos to insist that something had to be disruptive.

They must have fixed the BEEP BEEP BEEP right before the intermission because there was no sign of it during or after the break. Denk was pretty wonderful, as was the orchestra, and I feel I should say something more perceptive, or at least appreciative, since obviously a lot of work and sweat and thought goes into tossing off Liszt with easy virtuosity, but honestly serving as the opening amuse-bouche for Duke Bluebeard's Castle is a thankless task.

Into the Castle. This performance included the usually omitted opening narration, spoken by Ken Ruta. The music begins before the narration ends, which means you mostly want the speaker to shut up so you can listen to the music - you know, the usual. I can see why this bit is usually omitted. I hardly remember what the speaker says, and that's not because I'm writing this a few months later; I had forgotten it by the time the concert ended. I just remember it had sort of an ooga-booga Grand Guignol tone that to me signaled "campy horror film" rather than "richly textured, thought-provoking music drama."

Alan Held and Michelle DeYoung were both in strong, striking voice, and the orchestra was both lush and crystalline. The production was semi-staged, but I have no comment on the staging since I couldn't see it. I was in the second row, and the singers were placed behind the orchestra, so given the height of the Davies stage compared to the front orchestra seats the singers were blocked from view except for a few occasions when I'd spot them through a thicket of violas like jungle cats through a tangled underbrush, but those sightings were only sporadic. There were some large vaguely triangular white shapes moving around occasionally above the stage and there were projections, generally of a pretty basic descriptive sort: fields of flowers, close-ups of water dripping down walls, blood, stuff like that. It didn't add a whole lot but it also didn't detract. The projections were kind of a stripped-down version of the visually richer ones that Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera) used in its production a few years ago.

This is a really wonderful short opera and should be done more often. For one thing, I take away different impressions every time I see it, which is a sign of a work worth revisiting. Usually I think of the Bluebeard story as very much the wife's story: her love for him, her fear and confusion over the castle's (and his) mysteries, her intellectual curiosity, her bravery in entering and confronting his world. This time it struck me as very much about him, very much the story of a man trapped inside his own mind (this should not be read as Held overpowering DeYoung dramatically, since both were perfectly matched; it's just a matter of noticing something different in a work). As with the protagonist of Die Tote Stadt, even Bluebeard's efforts to reach out only amount to drawing someone else into his painful psychic labyrinth, and there Judith remains with his other wives. Has he literally killed her? Has he psychically killed her? Does she sacrifice herself? Or is it merely an image of her, a memory of what she was to him, that remains? Over in the Indian art galleries before the concert we saw a manuscript painting showing Krishna as a cowherd. For reasons that currently escape me he has to prove to someone who he is. He opens his mouth and the person who demanded his identity staggers back, because inside Krishna's mouth, briefly, one sees the entire universe. And that was how Bluebeard struck me: as a man with the entire universe expanding inside him. What does that leave for those on the outside?

Beethoven waves us off

Running in place trying to keep up though always falling behind as usual, I might as well start with the final concert I heard in the San Francisco Symphony's centennial season and work backwards through some symphonic nights. . . .

My ticket for the big season finale was for the Thursday performance, so my original plan was to spend the time after work and before the concert at the Asian Art Museum taking a closer look at the Phantoms of Asia show. Unfortunately for me, that Thursday turned out to be one of the museum's silly and annoying monthly party nights, though I guess it was fortunate I found out beforehand so I could give the museum a very wide berth, since this particular party featured (1) "litquake," (2) Trannyshack, (3) some tattoo thing, and (4) a DJ. Any one of those four elements would have sent me screaming into the dark night, but the combination of all four promised to fill the museum with enough smug self-regard and general hipster-douchebag-asshattery to reach suffocatingly toxic levels. In fact the slightest event - a carelessly dropped name, the fizz when some inked hackjob popped open his ironic Pabst Blue Ribbon - could easily react with some dragonish drag queen's acid "Oh honey" or the shrill relentless thumping of trendoid world music to trigger an implosion in the building that would bring it crashing down (as Samson brought the temple crashing down on the heads of the Philistines), with nothing surviving in the wreck except perhaps some fragment of an unobserved impassive Buddha, his hand raised in ambiguous blessing, his lips curved in an enigmatic smile.

So anyway the need to avoid the Asian Art Museum meant I had to rearrange my plans for the hours before the start of the concert. I did go to the SF Museum of Modern Art for a while, even though I had already been there earlier that day during my lunch hour. I don't like the cafeteria there, so I left after about an hour and walked up Market Street to Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, which I had never been to before and which is in the area of Market Street that the city has been desperately trying to gentrify for years. They're not quite there yet. My food was perfectly acceptable but the tables were surprisingly grimy and the generic loud music was irritating though not unexpected. A couple of street people talked loudly in the back, their possession-stuffed handcarts leaning against their table. Glassy-eyed and angry-looking folks, some street people, some office workers, floated by right outside the window. My dinner started to sit heavily in my stomach. I thought despondently of the healthier, tastier, and less expensive dinner I would have had at the Asian. I glumly wondered if I should bother renewing my museum membership. The best time for working people to visit there is Thursday evening, but they don't even have the late hours during the winter months (prime concert-attending season) and the rest of the year they frequently sabotage Thursday nights with their attempts to turn themselves into a ghastly third-rate nightclub, something I can easily get elsewhere were I so minded, unlike the chance to look at Asian art, which I can only get there. It's part of a sad trend among cultural institutions to throw away what they're actually good for in favor of interchangeable, irritating parties aimed at people who aren't really much interested in art. I'm not sure I'm really getting value from my membership.

Eventually I headed out into the drifting crowds, back down Market Street to Davies Hall, with hamburger, onion rings, and milkshake heavy in my stomach, still with well over an hour before the concert was to start, and nothing much to do. The big item on the program was the Beethoven 9, one of those pieces whose very greatness has led to a sort of cynical ennui among concert-goers who roll their eyes at riding such a familiar warhorse. But for me at least it's not something I've heard live that often (recordings are something else). In fact the only other time I remember hearing it live was for the centennial of the Boston Symphony, in a big free public concert on Boston Common. The park was mobbed, of course, and I ended up stuck next to a woman who talked loudly during the entire performance. She could not restrain her laughter and gleeful horror at the terrible gaucherie of those who applauded between movements. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," muttered a man next to me, so I was not the only victim of her presence who noted the irony in her mocking disapproval of bad concert behavior.

I was quite excited to hear this symphony live, perched as it is on the summit of several traditions, like some fantastical composite beast, lashing its strange choral tail toward heaven. The first part of the program was two short pieces by Ligeti and Schoenberg, both of whom I love, and both performed by the Symphony's superb chorus. I thought the pieces were very well chosen to complement the Beethoven: Ligeti's Lux aeterna, using the ancient words from the requiem mass, and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, mixing an eyewitness account from the Holocaust with the ancient prayer Shema Yisroel, look both backward and forward, combining daring musical invention with humanity's oldest and most basic questions about justice and meaning in the universe; they memorialize yet also move us forward: perfect accompaniments to Beethoven's final symphony.

There I was in my front row center seat, excited about the program, and pleased to see that the program-rustlers who usually sit next to me for this subscription series were nowhere in sight, and then, right before the lights dimmed, an incredibly enormous man sinks slowly into the seat on my left, and even though there is a double armrest on my right I am pinned to the far side of my seat by this meat-mountain and his swollen fleshbag limbs. Since I am very careful about not imposing on the space of others I felt equally constricted on my right side, since I'm pushed all the way over there, though the little old woman sitting on my right seemed cheerfully oblivious, humming a bit and tapping along to the more sombre moments in the Schoenberg and the Beethoven. Now instead of being a bit peeved that the first half is so short I am deeply grateful, since I cannot move. The Ligeti is dense yet ethereal. I think that Shuler Hensley's narration in the Schoenberg is not the way I would have done it - it's maybe a bit too obviously dramatic - but that's how Schoenberg wrote it, and the ultimate effect is very powerful, and I'm having trouble breathing since I don't even have room to cross my arms over my chest, my usual space-saving expedient, because I am so crammed into this seat by the vast implacable imperturbable wall of flesh beside me.

During intermission I look around and there are no empty seats, so I have no choice if I want to hear the Beethoven but to sit back down in what is available of the seat I paid for. Again, I can't move; I can't even put both arms by my sides because there's no room. I have to let my right arm hang down onto my lap, with my left hand holding on somewhere near my bicep to keep my left arm out of my neighbor's way, and I can't move from that position. I realize at one point that my eyeglasses have become smeared (most likely by my eyelashes) but I can't move my arms well enough to wipe them off. I really hate it when my glasses aren't clean. I'm feeling very claustrophobic, pinned in by a solid wall of inert flesh, seeing the orchestra through a misty smudge on my lenses. I hear the music as in a dream. I have an impression of a very fine performance of the familiar strains. The soloists (Erin Wall, Kendall Gladen, William Burden, and Nathan Berg), are all very fine, but long before Joy, the daughter of Elysium, spread her soft wings I could feel my entire left side slowly but surely going completely numb.

I have sat through more physically excruciating concerts at Davies Hall than anywhere else I've ever been. And it's not like Bayreuth, where you suffer on those hard seats but the sound is incomparable. You will not be compensated for your steerage-quality seating by beauty of either sound or surroundings. I just don't know what it is about that place (besides poor design). Maybe I just have bad luck there? Sometimes you'll read someone (usually someone associated with the Symphony) talking about what a wonderful hall it is, and I am befuddled and bemused and touched and saddened.

I had the feeling that the symphony was flashing before me the way a vast golden sun might finally flash setting on a sparkling green sea in a drowning man's last vision, only I was being drowned in enclosing suffocating waves of encroaching human flesh. The last note of the music had barely sounded when the man behind me immediately leaned forward and loudly screamed bravi! right in my ear. (I'll give him credit, though: he only kicked the back of my seat a couple of times. At least the kicks indicated I hadn't lost all feeling back there.) I leaned forward in my turn and suddenly realized I could take advantage of the tumultuous applause to jump to my feet, which I promptly did, joining the sincere ovation with special gratitude for my release. But I still felt so clamped in and claustrophobic that I couldn't even stand there applauding; usually I'm one of the last to leave the hall but I was so anxious for movement that as soon as Michael Tilson Thomas and the soloists left the stage I bolted to the side aisle and practically ran to the back of the house before the aisles were crammed with the lumbering herds and I was trapped again. I think only once before in my whole concert-going life have I left before the house-lights were turned up, and that was after a very long opera when I would otherwise have missed the last train. So I felt troubled by fleeing but also compelled to escape.

The Symphony was recording the performances for a future CD release, so perhaps I'll get to hear the performance under less grueling conditions, though given the several loud coughs during the quietest sections I'm not sure they'll use the performance I heard. And the Symphony continues its inexplicable policy of not using surtitles for the vocal parts, so of course during the Ode to Joy there was much rustling of programs among those who could actually use their arms.

And here's my little O Henry ending: the train home was a long time coming, but at least it was a full-length train. I took my seat in the first car, grateful to have no one beside me, but after two stops the entire train filled up with people returning from the Giants game, so there was no place to move to, and another, even fatter, man plopped down next to me, pinning me into my seat. Once I managed to get off the train even the empty nighttime sidewalks seemed barely enough restorative space, and I longed to be alone on an endless silent prairie under the canopy of stars that Schiller and Beethoven had been trying to point out to us.

Raj rage

The large upside-down A is the museum's eminently mockable new logo. It symbolizes plunging attendance or something.

A while ago I made an attempt to see the new exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, Maharajah: The Splendor of India's Royal Courts. It was a Thursday night, before a concert, and it was the last Thursday of the year with late hours at the Asian, so it should have been perfect, except it wasn't because it was one of the museum's occasional stupid party nights. Sometimes those are easily ignored, but their website description of this one prominently mentioned a DJ, which should have been warning enough, but denial is, as they say, not just a river in Egypt.

They do have a nice cafeteria and an elegant gift shop. And there I am in the lower right-hand corner.

It was the nightmare I could have predicted if I had been realistic. By the time I realized how bad it would be it was too late to do anything else, but too early to go sit in the lobby of Herbst Theater. Getting into the museum took even longer than usual. The lobby was packed with people standing in very long lines for something – food or alcohol, I think – and walking anywhere required maneuvering around the immobile masses. Art didn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind. I went into the cafeteria (no line) and I ate my Indian-themed dinner to the brain-dead thump-thump-thump the DJ was inflicting on us.

This delightful picture across a lobby wall is promoting another new exhibit I haven't seen yet, Deities, Demons, and Dudes with 'Staches, featuring the attractively stylized and colorful work of Sanjay Patel, an artist at the Royal Court of Pixar.

I tried to see the new exhibit. Those rooms weren't as jammed as the lobby, but each object had one to three people listening to the audio tour planted in front of it, and since many of the pieces seemed to be fairly small and elaborately detailed paintings, it was going to be impossible to see anything, and besides the brain-dead thump-thump-thump was loud and unending. So here is what I managed to gather in a quick look: lots of gold, lots of silver, several small jewel-like paintings.

This bas-relief is from the permanent collection: the great Monkey King is bringing his troops to someone's aid (not mine).

I went to the second floor to look at Japanese art, hoping to escape the noise. Here are cranes flying! thump-thump-thump Here are peonies blooming! Thump-thump-thump I went up to the top floor to look at the regular Indian art collection. Here is Shiva! thump-thump-thump Here is a tiger hunt! THUMP-THUMP-THUMP


I finally couldn’t take it any longer and fled into the night, wondering if I should bother to renew my membership in the Asian Art Museum. Since I work, the Thursday evening hours are the best time for me to visit. It's a great place to go before a Thursday night concert in Civic Center. But they don't have the late hours in November and December, which are prime concert months. And about once a month they take over Thursday evenings with one of these events. And here’s the thing: if I wanted to listen to shit music amplified to a deafening volume, with my path steadily blocked by oblivious assholes nursing their grossly overpriced trendoid drinks while ignoring me and trying to pick each other up, then I would just go to a bar. And there are dozens of such places. As far as I know, there is only one place in the vicinity where you can go to look at Asian art. Why would an organization ignore its unique advantage and try to become a more expensive and inconvenient version of what is easily available in a dozen other places?

at the Asian Art Museum

the main hall of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Bali/Josefowicz

One advantage of Thursday night concerts in Civic Center is that (depending on the time of year) the Asian Art Museum is open late. About once a month they have some sort of irritating event with loud bad music and crowds milling around drinking and other things I try to avoid. But if you go on a regular Thursday night, it's ideal. The museum's holdings are much larger than its building, so the permanent exhibits are not so permanent and change often. There are also special exhibits; the current one is Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance.

There is also a handy restaurant. Above is the pork stew, with decorative coriander.

Photography is not allowed in the special exhibits, which seems to be a universal museum rule, so all of the pictures here are from the lobby, the gift shop, or the permanent collection.

As is true of many African cultures, until the twentieth century these elaborate and beautiful works were created for use in rituals, sacred and social, rather than as stand-alone art objects. There are several fascinating videos built into the exhibit, showing dances, shadow puppet shows, and even cremations, which take place in animal-shaped coffins under elaborate palanquins, which are then set aflame. Unfortunately the video I saw did some editing on the actual burning, so you couldn't watch the whole progress of the fire, which I have always found maybe too fascinating.

The other main point of the exhibit is how the Dutch, after violently colonizing Bali, then promoted its image as an island paradise. Nothing like palm trees and bare-breasted women to make you forget the sordid economics of exploitation.

The art of Bali has been very influential, particularly on musicians; gamelan has fascinated and inspired composers from Debussy and Britten to Lou Harrison. The fascination with Bali has itself become an object of study and fascination; Evan Ziporyn recently wrote an opera called A House in Bali exploring the sojourns there of Colin McPhee, Walter Spies, and Margaret Mead (I wrote about the opera here).

Well, Bali: what's not to love? gamelan, ancient dances, shadow puppets! The three pictures of fabulous shadow puppets above, by the way, are from the gift shop, which means you could walk out of the exhibit with your own work of art. I love how they are elaborately colored, even though they are used mostly to create shadows. I was very tempted to buy one, but I was on my way to Leila Josefowicz's recital at Herbst Theater and it didn't seem like a good idea to carry a delicate and elaborate paper puppet through the rain to a concert and then home on BART. The exhibit runs until September 11, so I guess I have time for puppet-purchases under more auspicious circumstances.

This was my first time hearing Josefowicz. She was in recital with pianist John Novacek. It was very enjoyable, once I adjusted my expectations. Josefowicz is a MacArthur fellow, primarily for her advocacy of new music, so I was expecting something wilder than we got: there were five composers, and four of them were from the pantheon (Brahms, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Schubert), with Estonian Erkki-Sven Tuur (there should be an umlaut over each of those u’s) as the only contemporary. His piece, Conversio, was very attractive, sort of a minimalist hoe-down that ends in icy shrieks. Josefowicz is an astonishing virtuoso who can summon up all sorts of sounds, but (here comes the other expectation I had to adjust) warmth and lyricism were missing, at least in this recital. I don’t know if she felt the program simply didn’t call for them, or if the program was chosen specifically because it didn’t call for them. The playing was dazzling, like sun on a glacier, but I felt we were in a fairly restricted emotional world.

I would definitely go hear her again, but I just didn’t have that “oh, wow, she can do anything!” reaction I had when I first heard Hilary Hahn or Jennifer Koh live. It was the Stravinsky, of all things, that came the closest to an emotional connection; the Eclogues in the Due Concertant went to the heart. Novacek was a hard-driving accompanist. The first half was the Brahms Scherzo in C minor for Violin and Piano and the Shostakovich Sonata for Violin and Piano, Opus 134. After the intermission came the Stravinsky, the Tuur, and Schubert’s Rondo brilliant in B minor for Violin and Piano, D. 895. The encore was, of all delightfully unexpected things, Charlie Chaplin’s Smile (I didn’t catch the name of the person who did the arrangement – Haussman? – and I don’t see it listed on the San Francisco Performances site). The familiar song was not only free of schmaltz, it was oddly free of sentiment – like a pure unworldly shaft of icy light. I would never have guessed it could sound that way, but it was very refreshing and beautiful.