In the early 2000s, the pianist, composer, and music executive Jorge Mejia found himself captivated by his home, a small apartment building in the then decidedly unglamorous neighborhood at the southern end of South Beach.
“The building was always fascinating to me,” said Mejia, who got a bachelor’s in classical piano performance from the Frost School in 1996. Built in the early 1920s with Dade County pine, the rock-hard, termite-proof native wood, the two-story building at 221 Collins Avenue had survived hurricanes, being used as an army barracks during World War 2, and a series of economic and social upheavals that had left the area south of Fifth Street trailing the boom transforming the rest of South Beach.
“It made it through all these things,” said Mejia. “I would sit there and wonder who had lived there.”
He was particularly intrigued by the elderly owner, a retired actress losing her memory to age, who seemed like an emblem of the building’s unknown story. “I always wondered how she came to buy it,” Mejia said. “That started the inquiry flowing inside my head.”
“That question stayed with me, and I wanted to explore it in different ways—musically in the form of a concerto, and in writing in the form of a narrative.”
Mejia’s fascination comes to life through music and storytelling in “If These Walls Could Talk.” It is a concerto for piano and orchestra in three movements, inspired by three figures from different eras who Mejia imagined living at 221 Collins, evoking their lives in short, poetic stories.
This Sunday, “Walls” will have its U.S. premiere at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, with Mejia on piano playing with the Frost Symphony Orchestra(FSO), led by Frost School professor and revered conductor Gerard Schwarz. (The program also includes Maurice Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso” and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E Minor.)
The Arsht Center concert follows Friday’s global release of the album “If These Walls Could Talk,” recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. (The album, which includes other Mejia compositions, was produced by fellow Frost School alum Julio Reyes Copello, M.M. ’00, a GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY winning producer.)
Sunday’s premiere captures concentric circles of inspiration and experience for Mejia. Born in Colombia but raised in Miami, he is deeply connected and committed to the city. He attended New World School of the Arts, Miami’s famed arts high school; studied classical piano at the Frost School, where an internship launched him on a hugely successful career as president & CEO of Sony Music Publishing’s Latin and U.S. Latin Divisions. He has stayed close to the Frost School, where he is a longtime member of the Dean’s Advisory Committee, and has performed excerpts from “Walls” and other works here.
“This is a piece about Miami written in Miami, having its U.S. premiere in Miami,” Mejia said. “I have lots of friends and family here. This will be a really significant moment for the piece and for me. It means the world that people will connect to this incredible city emotionally through this piece.”
This is Mejia’s second project combining music and narrative, which he sees as a compelling and innovative way to connect people to classical music. In 2018, he released the critically praised, Latin GRAMMY-nominated “An Open Book: A Musical Memoir” (recorded with the Frost School’s Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra), which combined short written evocations of moments in his life with musical pieces.
He began working on “Walls” during the pandemic. “I suddenly found myself not having to be on a plane all the time,” he said. “That gave me a different headspace to create a larger, more focused work. As I was creating the music, I was always thinking about what the narrative would be. I started thinking about all the people who could have lived in the building.”
The First Floor movement is built around the character of Irving Goldstein, who Mejia imagines as a Jewish man from Brooklyn who chases a dream to buy 221 Collins, a few days before the devastating Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, which flattened most of Miami Beach. The Second Floor revolves around Sofia, a pianist and daughter of Cuban immigrants who becomes a nurse living in the building, and falls in love with an injured soldier, like one of the tens of thousands stationed in South Beach as they trained for World War II. The final movement, Rooftop, is inspired by the real-life elderly owner Mejia knew, who becomes Elena, a retired actress who carries the building’s stories within her, even as her memory fades.
Mejia researched South Beach’s history as he imagined the music, characters, and stories evolving together. “The first movement is evocative of a hurricane—you can listen for the eye in the middle,” he said. “The second movement reflects a love story, and the melody has questions and answers. The third movement has a kind of defiant streak.”
In addition to playing the piano, Mejia will speak the narratives himself, accompanied by projected imagery.
Schwarz first heard “Walls” when Mejia played it for him at the home where the composer lives with his wife and their young daughter, in a very different building on the southern tip of South Beach. “I liked it very much,” said Schwarz, who is friends with Mejia. “It was charming, poetic, energetic, full of Latin rhythms and imaginative ideas.”
The conductor didn't find out the work had a narrative until the two men began working on the performance together. Schwarz compared “Walls” to a tone poem, an older form of classical composition that evokes stories or imagery. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” he said of "Walls." “You can listen to Jorge’s piece and come up with a different kind of story. That can be very useful in bringing people into our world.”
He said it was fulfilling for him to conduct a work by such a multi-talented alumnus. “The first time I heard him play his concerto, what struck me immediately was what a terrific pianist he is,” Schwarz said. “He’s remarkable, and we’re very proud of him because he’s one of ours.”
Mejia is hugely gratified that Schwarz, who has a storied history conducting and leading great orchestras and musical programs, would conduct the U.S. premiere of “Walls.”
“It means the world to collaborate with someone of his caliber as a conductor and musician,” Mejia said.
That Schwarz and the FSO are from the school where Mejia studied and launched his multi-faceted musical career adds another circle of meaning to Sunday’s premiere.
“The whole idea of #FrostBuilt is that it prepares you for life,” Mejia said. “Which is what we’re talking about.”
IF YOU GO:
The Frost Symphony Orchestra performs Jorge Mejia’s “If These Walls Could Talk” and works by Ravel and Shostakovich at 7 p.m. Sunday, April 26th, at the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami.
Tickets are $29.25 to $58.50 at https://www.arshtcenter.org
