Rick Steves to Appear with New Jersey Symphony for Upcoming Concert

Guidebook author and public television host Rick Steves will join New Jersey Symphony November 7–8 for Rick Steves' Europe: A Symphonic Journey, a concert that pairs Europe's most stirring Romantic-era anthems with high-definition travel footage and Steves' insights into European history.

Nicholas Hersh, music director of California's Modesto Symphony and former associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, returns to conduct performances at Mayo Performing Arts Center (MPAC) in Morristown and State Theatre New Jersey in New Brunswick. Steves appears in person as host.

The concert begins at home with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then heads across the Atlantic. At each stop, from Austria and Germany to Norway and France, Steves sets the historical and cultural scene before the orchestra plays music that captures that nation's spirit, as footage from the country fills a big screen behind the musicians. Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” the official anthem of the European Union, closes the European leg before Sousa's The Stars and Stripes Forever brings the journey home.

The graduation-day melody in Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 is better known in Britain as the patriotic song “Land of Hope and Glory.” Verdi's Nabucco Overture quotes “Va, pensiero,” the chorus Italians have long embraced as an unofficial national anthem. And while Grieg's “Morning Mood” may evoke a Norwegian sunrise, in Ibsen's play Peer Gynt it greets the dawn in Morocco.