On Friday 17th and Saturday 18th April the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (ASO) will premiere a brand new commissioned work as part of their 2026 Symphony Series.
Australian composer and pianist Joe Chindamo has been commissioned to write Concerto del Motore for the ASO. Inspired by and written for ASO Principal Clarinetist Dean Newcomb, the new work draws on Dean’s lifelong passion for motorsport and his ‘dual life’ of competitive car drifting and also leading the ASO’s clarinet section.
Dean spoke to Glam Adelaide about this new work, his love of motorsports and what drew him to pursue music professionally.
“My family are all musical – I’m the youngest of four. I grew up being surrounded by music. My mother is a piano teacher, so she taught me piano from a very young age, and music was just part of life. My upbringing was so surrounded by music I actually thought that’s how everyone’s lives were.”
This is Dean’s 16th year playing with the ASO.
“The orchestra has become a family. If everyone knows each other, you can predict each other a bit better. You can start to advance the way you play. The clarinet section that I’m in has been together for a long time — the three of us have been playing together for 16 years, which is crazy. I know what they’re going to do, they know what I’m going to do, and I can try new things and we can start to evolve together. It’s like that for other sections as well. We’ve been playing together so long that you no longer have to guess what the other person is going to do. You all work together and it acts as one body, and that’s what makes it sound amazing – everyone’s working together.”
Besides music and the ASO, Dean’s other love is motorsports, especially drifting – a controlled driving technique where a driver intentionally oversteers to slide sideways through corners.
“I’ve always loved cars since childhood. Like so many kids, I was drawn to the adrenaline rush. It’s really easy to get addicted to the speed. I see parallels with that in music — it shares that same adrenaline rush. It’s certainly a different side of adrenaline when you’re dealing with drifting and racing because your life is a bit more on the line. But in a way, they’re very, very similar because when you’re playing music, you’re controlling the music with your fingers, with your body. When you’re drifting or racing, you’re controlling the car with your hands and your body. You sit very still in a car, and you just move your hands or move your feet, and it’s very much all to do with what’s going on inside your body. I guess because I found my passion in music and found something that I could do well in music, it translated to motorsport in a way. I found that I was pretty good at motorsport. I ended up winning two state championships in drifting in South Australia and I’ve competed nationally as well.”
Dean shared with Glam Adelaide how the commissioned work, Concerto del Motore, came about.
“I met the composer, Joe Chindamo, on the way to a festival in the Barossa. As usual the conversation turned to what each of us do in our spare time. We were showing each other what we do. He composes a lot, so I heard a lot of his compositions. I showed him some drifting. He was amazed by it as he had never seen drifting before. It wasn’t until a year or so later and another commission of his for the ASO was being performed that he came up to me and said ‘I want to write you a concerto and it will be about drifting. I feel very inspired by that.’
“The piece doesn’t completely reflect the sounds of motorsport. It’s not just loud roaring and crazy screeches the whole time. It’s actually very introspective of what it feels like to have a passion that you commit to.”
We asked Dean how much creative input he had through the composition stage of the new work or if he had to wait until it was completed before he could hear and play it.
“I was very honoured to be able to talk to Joe very openly about the composition. He wrote the last movement very, very quickly. There are three movements in the piece, and he wrote the last movement and orchestrated the whole orchestra, the whole clarinet part, in a week, which is insane. From that, I could tell the energy that he had for the piece. I didn’t have a lot of input in that last movement, but then that sort of inspired me to let him know how that made me feel, which then inspired him to come up with content for the earlier movements and what we sort of felt from the piece. There are lots of moments where I said that something was too hard, or too easy, or maybe this would sound interesting. There were a few times where we work shopped sections that didn’t quite make sense as I needed to be able to sell the story he was trying to convey in the music. If I could understand his story in the music, it made it easy to sell it through my playing.”
By contrast Chindamo’s work is paired alongside Copland’s Quiet City, a quiet and atmospheric piece showcasing moments of stillness with solo trumpet and horn. Quiet City also highlights solo performances from ASO musicians Peter Duggan (Cor Anglais) and David Khafagi (Trumpet).
The program’s grand finale is Rachmaninoff’s much-loved Second Symphony known for its emotional warmth and romantic tones.
In the Quiet will be performed at the Adelaide Town Hall Friday 17th April and Saturday 18th April.
“I’m really excited to show the audience that a contemporary piece of music doesn’t need to be too challenging. I think this piece is accessible to any audience. It’s very cinematic, it’s very visual in the way that it sounds. I feel like the way the last movement ends is such a rush and such a wall of sound from the orchestra. It is such a cinematic universe that Joe’s created that I think they’ll be very surprised at what a brand new piece of music composed this year for a living performer, a living composer, and a living orchestra can sound like live.”
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
In The Quiet – Symphony Series
Adelaide Town Hall
17 – 18 April 2026
https://www.aso.com.au/events/symphony-series-2-in-the-quiet/
