Jorge Mejia and The London Symphony Orchestra: If These Walls Could Talk

The apartment building at 221 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida survived the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, and later became the home of Jorge Mejia—composer, pianist and music industry executive. “I had always wanted to write something about the apartment building,” Mejia tells Apple Music Classical, “and about all the lives that must have passed through those walls.” That desire was finally realised in If These Walls Could Talk, a 20-minute concerto for piano and orchestra (with Mejia himself as soloist) which sits at the heart of the album bearing its title. “I consciously wrote the first movement as a storm, the eye of the hurricane passing through it,” Mejia explains. “For the second movement, I thought about a love story, questions and answers as two people start getting to know each other, then something deeper. And for the third, I wanted something oddly, quietly defiant, which is what happens at the end, where in live performances I invite the audience to sing along.” The bulk of If These Walls Could Talk was written during the Covid pandemic, but on completing the concerto Mejia found that its subject matter continued to resonate in his imagination. “After the music was done, I started coming up with the specific characters to give life to the music,” he says, “although maybe it was the music that gave life to the characters. The full circle effect is one of the things that I really love about the work.” The upshot was a set of three short stories set in 221 Collins Avenue, featuring characters specifically suggested by the three movements of the concerto. “The music stands on its own, as do the stories—you don’t need either one to understand the other,” Mejia explains. “That said, if you choose to read the stories, you may gain a deeper sense of the music. They are intricately tied together, but they are also separate—a kind of parallel relationship; two complementary pathways into the same world.” Mejia has also included on the album a group of six sextets for piano and string quintet, which grew out of another pandemic-era project commissioned by Miami City Ballet. “There was something about that instrumentation—five strings, as opposed to the more traditional four, with a double bass adding real weight to the low end—that resonated with me,” he comments. “The sextets sit alongside the concerto as reflections: smaller, more immediate, but part of the same world.” With If These Walls Could Talk, Mejia has deliberately sought to forge a musical style which “feels direct and human”, as he puts it. “It’s lyrical, harmonically rich, and grounded in traditional orchestral craft, but shaped by a modern sense of colour and motion—dissonance as a heightener of emotion, with form more as a fluid vessel than a fixed path. Above all, I’m after clarity of emotion—that’s to say, music that invites you in rather than keeping you at a distance. The music is pure, raw-feeling, and in that way it is a deeply personal experience.”