It was a fantastical, hard-to-believe premise: Patti Smith, the gritty sage of downtown rock, would play a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art filled with songs and poetry responding to an exhibition about Yuan-dynasty art made under the rule of Khubilai Khan. The performance itself, at the auditorium nestled in the museum's Egyptian wing, did not fail to live up to its weird promise. First delivering a set of hypnotic recitations of verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and classical Chinese poets, Smith succeeded in lulling the audience into a transportive happy nap-like state, only to break listeners from their daze with a blast of jangly dream-themed classic rock — just as "a profound sleep, at least of the external senses" overtook Coleridge as he was composing "Kubla Khan," only to be shattered by the importunate person from Porlock.

The strange and wonderful event — born from the Met's "The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty" show, which runs through January 2 — was in fact Smith's eighth such collaboration with the Met. She has lyrically accompanied William Blake's apocalyptic visions, for instance, and has serenaded Robert Frank's portraits of America. But this particular match of visual theme and lyrical response seemed inspired. As Smith read the poems, Michael Campbell spelled out dreamy tunes on the glass marimba while Jesse Smith — Patti's daughter and the co-composer of the poetry's accompaniment — played along, surly behind a big black Steinway. 

Then, launching into the music segment of the evening, she started to really rock. Lenny Kaye hopped on stage with his guitar and the singing began. Even in retrospect, it's not necessarily easy to pinpoint the overlap between the Met show and songs like "All I Have to Do Is Dream" (made famous by the Everly Brothers) or Smith's own "Pissing in a River." The musician’s rendition of "I'm Only Sleeping," intended as a tribute to John Lennon (whose 70th birthday would have been October 7), was, in Smith's own estimation, "really bad." But when she got the sedate crowd belting the lyrics to "Puff the Magic Dragon," it was easy to forgive her for any of the performance's overall weak points.

"Children," she addressed the crowd, before launching into the ballad of the loss of little Jackie Paper's childhood, "I can't do a night about dreams and dragons without this doctoral thesis being sung." She confessed that she still experienced pangs of agony crooning such saccharine fare, after years of forced singalongs with her Peter, Paul, and Mary-loving mother. So she quickly reestablished her punk credibility with a fist-pumping rendition of "People Have the Power."

But while Smith projected her street-toughened, sharp-witted persona throughout the course of the night, she departed now and then from her opium-laced longings and weathered songs to fire off some hardcore old-lady banter from the stage, primarily on the subject of her dowdy reading glasses. "I misplaced my normal reading glasses," Smith announced at the beginning of the concert, peeking out through her split-ended mass of hair as she slouched behind a microphone in her jeans, cowboy boots, a weathered t-shirt, and a men's blazer. "These aremy ugly glasses," she said, holding up gold wire-rimmed spectacles. "You have to be really nice to them." The somewhat demure elderly crowd clapped. "See," Smith said to her glasses. "They really like you." And while at first it was unclear if the crowd knew what to make of Smith, by the encore of "Goodnight Irene" and "Dancing Barefoot," it seemed that everyone was quite fond of the glasses and the musician behind them. "You were so kind to my glasses," Smith said. "Now they’re conceited."