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Christine Baranski Was in the playground outside St. Matthew’s Church bedford, new yorkIt was about three years ago when she met Matthew Gard, artistic director of the Grammy-nominated Skylark Vocal Ensemble.
“I like choral music,” she told him.
Baranski, an Emmy- and Tony-award winning actor, went to attend some of their concerts.
“I was basically a fangirl,” she recalled. “And I think we just said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do something together?'”
Baranski agreed to narrate a music-and-spoken-word version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” last December at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which owns the original manuscript of the 1843 classic. A recording was made at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts the previous June and released on the LSO Live label on 4 December.
She’ll perform it again with the group Thursday night at the Morgan, which is screening the manuscript through Jan. 11, and then the next night at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, where she’ll again play the tart Agnes van Rijn when filming begins on Season 4 of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” on Feb. 23.
“I have a thing for keeping the language alive, for keeping the beautiful, well-written language alive,” he said. “Dickens, Stoppard, Shakespeare. We’re becoming too lazy to use the English language.”
she compliments Julian FellowesCreator of “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey” for distinguished prose.
“I think he would play Agnes if he could,” she said. “He gives her funny things.”
Baranski relied on the skills that won her an Emmy for “Sybil” and Tonys for “The Real Thing” and “Rumors.”
“You get a chance to bring a lot of different characters to life, not the least of which is Ebenezer,” he said at the Library this month. “It’s amazing for an actor to pull off these different characters in as subtle a way as possible. As an acting piece, it’s amazing. And not a lot of women have done that. It’s been done by Alistair Cook and Patrick Stewart and Patrick Page and all these great actors – but I’ve been able to do it with the chorus.”
The Guard features words by Baranski and 10 carols by composer Benedict Sheehan that include “Auld Lang Syne” in addition to “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls.”
needed trimming
Telling the whole story would have made for a Wagnerian-long evening.
Gard said, “The manuscript itself is about 30,000 words and to make it a concerto we needed about 5,000 words.” “I tried to make room for clear musical exclamation points or emotional feelings in the narrative, almost like arias in an opera.”
Sheehan worked with Gard on the 2020 recording “Once Upon a Time”, which stitched together the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”.
“I said why don’t you commission me to write choral underscoring for the narrative that could tie these various choral pieces together?” Sheehan said.
Baranski got narration experience in 2023 when he replaced Liev Schreiber with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall for Beethoven’s “Egmont”.
“I can do this my whole career,” she thought at the time. “Just put me in a concert hall surrounded by great musicians.”
Preparing to return to the ‘Gilded Age’
After working with dialect coach Howard Samuelsohn, Baranski practiced on Zoom to hone her 19th-century voice and avoid clichés.
“I said it’s a good practice for Aunt Agnes because it’s the kind of speech we were taught at Juilliard,” Baranski, 73, said, recalling Edith Skinner’s lessons decades ago.
“Sometimes it’s just a question of modifying your voice, just different timbres and staccato or legato,” she said. “I want the voice of the ghost of Christmas past to be disembodied… uncanny.”
He had no desire to join in the carolers.
“We take from each other,” she said. “When the chorus first heard my version of it, I think it subtly influenced the feeling of it and I take from the mood of the carol and bring it into my own interpretation.”
“It’s actually a very exciting back-and-forth game,” Gard said. “Sometimes it’s not entirely clear who’s driving the bus.”
possibly an annual holiday entertainment
Baranski is hopeful the project has a future.
He said, “We want to film it in Morgan someday.” “Make it an annual event at the Morgan, because there’s the manuscript and the people. It’s one of those things, like Handel’s ‘Messiah’ or ‘The Nutcracker.’
She is going to gift the CD to her grandchildren, four boys aged 2 to 12. Her previous holiday experiences include playing Martha May Whovier in the 2000 film “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“Surprisingly they weren’t even interested in me being Martha May in ‘The Grinch,'” Baranski said. “His friends sometimes say: ‘She’s your grandmother.’ But I just want to be their grandmother – do you know what I mean – and no one else?’
