A composer put Einstein's equations and AI into orchestral music. The result is surprisingly moving.

Key points

• Robert Laidlow's debut album on NMC Records uses Einstein's field equations, Newton's universal law and artificial intelligence as the foundations for orchestral compositions.
• The BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni and pianist Joseph Havlat perform the works on the recording.
• The album's centrepiece, Warp, is a 12-minute piano concerto built around a musical interpretation of Einstein's equations describing how mass bends space and time.
• Laidlow works across both the sciences and classical music, and his pieces are described as intricate and imaginative while remaining accessible to listeners.

When a composer sits down to write a piano concerto, the usual inspirations are love, grief or the natural world. Robert Laidlow chose Einstein's field equations, the mathematical rules that describe how mass warps the fabric of space and time.

The result is Warp, a tense, 12-minute piece that anchors Laidlow's debut album on NMC Records. It is performed here by the BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni, and soloist Joseph Havlat.

The premise sounds like a university lecture. The music does not feel like one.

Orchestral lines spiral upward, instruments pushed to their edges, while the piano holds its own course and eventually arrives somewhere calm. Laidlow is not illustrating an equation on a whiteboard. He is doing something closer to asking: what does it feel like to move through bent space?

Artificial intelligence, meaning the technology behind systems like ChatGPT and other software that learns patterns from data and generates outputs from them, appears elsewhere on the record as subject matter. So does Newton's universal law of gravitation. Laidlow treats these ideas the way other composers treat seasons or saints: as emotional territory worth mapping in sound.

The Guardian was first to review the record, noting that the concepts are complex but the music stays approachable throughout.

That accessibility matters. Classical music with a scientific concept attached can easily become a gimmick, a press release dressed up in strings. Laidlow avoids that. The ideas are the starting point, not the sales pitch.

The BBC Philharmonic's playing is described as vibrantly detailed. The recording itself is clean and generous, giving the ensemble room to breathe.

Does this tell us anything useful about how AI is being used in the arts?

Yes, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. Laidlow is not using AI to compose. He is composing about AI, treating it as a subject serious enough to sit alongside Einstein and Newton. That is a different kind of cultural signal. It suggests the technology has moved from novelty to subject matter, something artists feel compelled to reckon with rather than simply use.

For listeners who have never sat through a modern orchestral piece, this record is a reasonable place to start. The ambition is real. So is the welcome.

What to listen for: the moment in Warp where the orchestral pressure peaks and the piano simply refuses to be swallowed.