Haylock Consort - Tomkins: These Distracted Tymes

Haylock Consort are playing at Robinson College Chapel on Friday 13 November, a concert dedicated to the life and work of the Welsh composer Thomas Tomkins. It's a free performance, so you can just turn up and listen.

The programme pulls from different sides of Tomkins' output. The liturgical side is well represented: the Fifth Service, Magnificat, Funeral Sentences, and Nunc Dimittis all point to the church music that formed a large part of his career. Alongside those, there's the more intimate, instrumental side of things: A Fancy for Two to Play (MB 32) and 'Arthur Philips' Ground (MB 40), two pieces for a smaller ensemble. And then there's A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times, which gives the whole evening its title.

Taken together, it's a fair cross-section of his work rather than a single slice. You get the larger-scale service music, the smaller instrumental pieces, and the more reflective, secular side of things, all in one sitting. It's a good way to get a sense of what he did without having to piece it together from separate recordings.

The concert starts at 6:30pm and runs for about 35 minutes, so it's a relatively short commitment on a Friday evening. It's free to attend, and the venue is the Chapel of Robinson College on Grange Road (CB3 9AN). If you're around that part of Cambridge on the 13th, it's an easy one to drop into.