Do you want to experience something truly unique to Chicago? You need to snag some tickets for Too Hot to Handel: The Jazz-Gospel Messiah.

One of Chicago’s greatest holiday traditions, audiences flock to hear the thrilling renditions of Händel’s Messiah. It’s the Jazz-Gospel Messiah for its 18th presentation. This year, for the first time, the popular jazz-gospel-rock-funk version of G.F. Handel’s traditional Messiah oratorio welcomes the start of the holiday season, Saturday, December 3 at 7:30 PM and Sunday, December 4 at 3:00 PM.

Tickets start at $28 and are now available at AuditoriumTheatre.org

Created in 1992 as a collaboration between conductor Marin Alsop with orchestrators and arrangers Bob Christianson and Gary Anderson, Too Hot to Handel: The Jazz-Gospel Messiah had its Chicago premiere at the Auditorium Theatre in 2006. The production has returned every year since, formerly during the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This year, Too Hot to Handel lands right in the middle of the traditional Messiah season in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Using the original musical material from Messiah, Alsop, Christianson, and Anderson reinvented the basic melodic and harmonic outlines of Handel’s original by using scat, backbeats, jazz and gospel vocals, instrumental improvisation, and the walking bass line played by the bass soloist. Messiah’s recitatives are expanded to shout-and-response improvisations over a gospel organ and piano accompaniment while the original metrical material of the work is expanded via a drum set. The result is that Too Hot, with its jazz and gospel elements, acts as a modern-day musical tribute to the original work by introducing a new generation to Handel’s masterpiece.

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