San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Chance to perform live (finally)
Baritone Jonathan Nussman, a recent USCD grad, is thrilled to join San Diego-based Project [Blank]’s ‘O Mensch!’
It certainly wasn’t Jonathan Nussman’s plan to graduate from the University of California San Diego during a pandemic. But that’s exactly what happened. Last year, as the coronavirus pandemic shut down the arts world, the baritone received his Doctor of Musical Arts, a degree he completed after six years of hard work.
It wasn’t easy. He juggled school with work — performing as well as teaching music history classes and private voice lessons. Receiving his degree last summer was the finish line he’d long worked hard to cross. Then COVID-19 happened.
“I had a full season lined up through next year,” said the 36-yearold Nussman, a South Carolina native who moved to San Diego in 2014 to study contemporary music performance at UC San Diego. “Most of that has been canceled.”
But like many artists, he wasn’t about to let the pandemic stop him from pursuing his dream. Nussman is a classically trained opera singer whose goal is to bring classical music performance into the 21st century through multidisciplinary performances that blend opera, theater, movement and new technology.
The pandemic-induced explosion of online and virtual performances, he said, was not necessarily what he was looking for, but it did present new opportunities.
“I have been fortunate to have been able to participate in online and virtual projects,” much of it from the Hillcrest home he shares with his wife, Megan Murphy. But, he added, “singers are inherently very social. We are used to collaborating with other people. Losing the opportunity to be in the same room and making music with them has been hard. Losing the ability to be in the same room with another living person and to sing together ... you definitely feel like something inherently important is missing.”
He’s grateful for “technology ... that allows us to attempt to function normally in an isolated environment,”
he said, “but that is not a substitute for being together, breathing together and moving together.”
That’s why what’s happening this weekend is a remarkable moment for Nussman: After months of virtual work done in front of a computer screen, he is performing a livestreamed concert with his longtime friend and collaborator, San Diego-based pianist Kyle Adam Blair.
Today, he’s delivering the last of two performances of “O Mensch!” by the French composer Pascal Dusapin. The concert opens the 2021 season of San Diego-based Project [Blank], with interactive set and projections by Joshua Moreno and direction by mezzosoprano Leslie Ann Leytham, who co-founded Project [Blank] in 2018 with pianist Brendan Nguyen.
“After nearly a year of only interacting with other musicians over Zoom, it has been a revelatory, soul-enriching experience to return to in-person music and staging rehearsals with Kyle — even if we’ve had to add masks and 20 feet of extra distance between us,” Nussman said of the concert, which will be livestreamed from El Salon, formerly the 1920s-era Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church before it was restored by Casa Familiar into a multimedia theater performance space in San Ysidro.
“There will not be an in-person audience,” Nussman said in an email sent to friends last week. “Instead we are using cutting-edge audio and video technology to create an immersive and multilevel 360-degree performance space that will be broadcast around the world.”
The performance — which will be in German, with English and Spanish subtitles — will showcase Dusapin’s 75-minute work for solo singer and piano that’s based on the poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Guardian said of the work: “Instead of something modest ... Dusapin produced this enormous cycle of settings of Nietzsche’s early poems — 23 of them altogether, with four piano interludes.”
Nussman — @jnussman on Instagram — is grateful that despite the arts shutdown, now going on for nearly 10 months, he’s still able to do what he loves.
“I feel really lucky I’m still doing something,” he said. “Many arts organizations are struggling right now. My hope is for them to make it through these difficult times and that all of us be able to resume our important work as soon as we can. I don’t know how realistic that hope is, but that is a big hope of mine.”