Legendary drummer Stewart Copeland and naturalist Martyn Stewart released a pioneering symphonic album titled “Wild Concerto” on April 19, 2026, to highlight global biodiversity loss. The project integrates the vocalizations of endangered and extinct animals with orchestral arrangements recorded at the historic Abbey Road Studios.
The album features a diverse range of natural sounds, including the calls of hyenas, howler monkeys, and arctic wolves. According to reports from CBS News, Copeland waded through 30,000 hours of field recordings to select specific animal sounds that would serve as the primary melodic and rhythmic leads for the compositions.
“They’re not actual notes, but you put an instrument with them and those animals become Pavarotti,” said Stewart Copeland, the former drummer for The Police. He noted that the raw sounds of the creatures dictated the specific orchestral instruments used, such as pairing a trombone with the howling of wolves.
Martyn Stewart, a naturalist based in Florida, provided the audio foundation for the project from his massive archive of nearly 100,000 recordings. His collection includes the sounds of the northern white rhinoceros, now extinct in the wild, and the critically endangered Panamanian golden frog.
As reported by Yahoo News, the production took place in Copeland’s Los Angeles laboratory and Abbey Road, where the team aimed to turn animal sounds into a formal concerto. The project serves as a “barometer of the planet,” according to Martyn Stewart, who has spent over 60 years documenting the changing acoustic landscape of the natural world.
The collaboration began after Martyn Stewart’s niece encouraged him to preserve his life’s work while he was living with cancer. This led the naturalist to partner with Copeland, who transitioned from rock stardom to film scoring and classical composition following a suggestion from director Francis Ford Coppola.
Copeland utilized a vast array of instruments in his studio, including gongs, waterphones, and tuned bells, to complement the wildlife recordings. The album aims to foster public appreciation for the environment as many of the featured species face the threat of extinction.