From 24 December the video of Un Canto di Natale will be available on the website of the museum and on the Cologni Foundation’s Vimeo channel. Based on Charles Dickens’s famous novella A Christmas Carol, it is a work produced ad hoc for the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi by the Fondazione Cologni dei Mestieri d’Arte, in collaboration with the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi – Fondazione Milano and the Associazione Noema. Dickens’s story has been set in the rooms of the museum, where two ghosts of former actors (played by Riccardo Bursi and Fabrizio Calfapietra) wander around with the permission of the master of the house, reminiscing about the past and deciding to reread and reinterpret A Christmas Carol; an evocative theatrical interpretation enriched by the intervention of... more ghosts, in the shape of a vocal quintet, the Ensemble Vocale Harmonia Cordis, who – in the otherworldly guise of former members of the chorus at La Scala – sing Christmas carols. As in the best tradition, in Andrea Piazza’s screen adaptation and direction the music alternates with spoken parts: freely adapted from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, it tells the story of the miserly and selfish Ebenezer Scrooge, visited on Christmas Eve by three spirits. In the spirit of generosity celebrated by Dickens’s tale, the video is a homage paid by the Fondazione Cologni to the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi and with it to all its online viewers; a gesture – and a message – that is even more significant at a moment in which there is an ever greater need to give meaning and value to time and to sharing, looking together to the future.
