Stewart Copeland turns animal calls into orchestral Wild Concerto

Stewart Copeland turned birdsong, wolf calls and frog choruses into a 12-movement orchestral work designed to make nature sound immediate, urgent and unmistakably alive. Wild Concerto arrived on April 18, 2025, on Platoon Records, built around the migration of the Arctic tern and shaped by the idea that the planet’s wild voices can carry the melody.

The project paired Copeland, best known as the drummer for The Police, with naturalist Martyn Stewart, whose archive has grown over a career that began in 1975 and now spans more than 30,000 hours of nature sounds, more than 97,000 individual recordings and more than 3,500 bird species. Stewart has recorded in more than 60 countries, and his collection, which also includes insects, amphibians and mammals, has been described as one of the world’s most important private archives of nature sounds.

That archive is the backbone of the record. Copeland said he selected animals such as wolves, hyenas, sparrow, red-breasted nuthatch, white-throated sparrow, Arctic tern and frogs because their calls function like rhythmic or melodic parts in a score. Rather than treating field recordings as decoration, Wild Concerto uses them as atmosphere and melody, with the natural sounds effectively placed at center stage.

The album was recorded with the Kingdom Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, and Apple Music described it as a 2025 classical crossover release featuring a 30-piece orchestra with Copeland on percussion. Ricky Kej produced the project, extending a partnership with Copeland that already produced Divine Tides, the 2022 Grammy winner for Best New Age Album.

Copeland has said he has long used unconventional sounds in composition, including in film scores such as Rumble Fish and Wall Street, but Wild Concerto pushes that instinct further by letting animal calls shape the architecture of the piece. He said the project was meant for “the benefit of Homo sapiens,” so listeners would appreciate and protect the planet and its other species.

For Stewart, known as “the David Attenborough of Sound,” the record extends a life’s work built one species at a time. In a moment when biodiversity loss and habitat decline often arrive as statistics, Wild Concerto tries to translate those warnings into something audiences can hear.