NEW YORK – About three years ago, Christine Baranski found herself at a playground outside St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford, New York, when she had a serendipitous encounter with Matthew Guard, the artistic director of the Grammy-nominated Skylark Vocal Ensemble.

In the midst of their conversation, Baranski, an acclaimed actor with Emmy and Tony awards to her name, expressed her deep affection for choral music. “I love choral music,” she shared with Guard.

Her admiration for the art form soon led her to attend several of Guard’s concerts. Reflecting on those experiences, she described herself as something of a “fangirl,” which eventually sparked the idea of a collaboration. “Wouldn’t it be fun to do something together?” she mused.

Their shared enthusiasm culminated in Baranski agreeing to lend her voice as the narrator for a unique music-and-spoken word rendition of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” This special performance took place last December at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, a venue that boasts the original manuscript of the 1843 literary classic. The collaboration was immortalized in a recording made in June at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and released to the public on December 4 under the LSO Live label.

Baranski agreed to narrate a music-and-spoken word version of Charles Dickens’ “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 last June at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and released Dec. 4 on the LSO Live label.

She will perform it again with the group on Thursday night at the Morgan, which is displaying the manuscript through Jan. 11, and again the following night at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, where she will again portray the acerbic Agnes van Rhijn when season four of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” starts filming season on Feb. 23.

“I have this thing about keeping language alive, keeping beautiful, well-written language,” she said. “Dickens, Stoppard, Shakespeare. We’re getting awfully lazy in our use of the English language.”

She compliments Julian Fellowes, creator of “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey,” for distinguished prose.

“I think he’d play Agnes if he could,” she said. “He gives her the witty stuff.”

Baranski leaned on the skills that earned her an Emmy for “Cybill” and Tonys for “The Real Thing” and “Rumors.”

“You get to bring to life a lot of different characters, none the least of which is Ebenezer,” she said at the library this month. “It’s wonderful for an actor to differentiate in as subtle a way as possible these different characters. As an acting piece, it’s wonderful. And not many women have done it. It’s been done by Alistair Cooke and Patrick Stewart and Patrick Page and all these great actors — but I get to do it with a chorus.”

Guard weaves in underscoring by composer Benedict Sheehan with Baranski’s words and 10 carols that include “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls” plus “Auld Lang Syne.”

Trimming was needed

Reciting the entire story would have created a Wagnerian-length evening.

“This manuscript itself is about 30,000 words and we needed about 5,000 to make it a concert length,” Guard said. “I tried to create space in the narrative for obvious musical exclamation points or emotional feelings, almost like arias in an opera.”

Sheehan had worked together with Guard on a 2020 recording “Once Upon a Time” that weaved 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 can kind of stitch together these different choral pieces?” Sheehan said.

Baranski got narration experience in 2023 when she replaced Liev Schreiber with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall for Beethoven’s “Egmont.”

“I could do this the rest of my career,” she thought at the time. “Just put me in a concert hall surrounded by great musicians.”

Preparing for `Gilded Age’ return

After working with dialect coach Howard Samuelsohn, Baranski practiced on Zoom to hone a 19th-century voice and avoid cliché.

“I said this is a good warm up for Aunt Agnes because it’s that kind of speech we were taught at Juilliard,” the 73-year-old Baranski said, recalling lessons from Edith Skinner decades ago.

“Sometimes it’s just a question of modulating your voice, just different rhythms and staccato or legato,” she said. “I want the voice of the Ghost of Christmas past to be disembodied… ethereal.”

She didn’t have an urge to join in on the carols.

“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 interpretation.”

“It’s a really exciting back-and-forth actually,” Guard said. “It’s not really totally clear who’s driving the bus at times.”

Possibly an annual holiday entertainment

Baranski hopes the project has a future.

“We want to film this someday in the Morgan,” she said. “Make this a yearly event at the Morgan, because here’s the manuscript and people. It’s just one of those things like Handel’s `Messiah’ or `The Nutcracker.’”

She’s going to gift the CD to her grandchildren, four boys ranging from ages 2 to 12. Among her previous holiday experiences was portraying Martha May Whovier in the 2000 movie “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

“They’re curiously not interested in my even being Martha May in `The Grinch,’” Baranski explained. “Their friends sometimes say: `That’s your grandmother.’ But I just want to be their grandma — do you know what I mean — and not somebody?”