Kindred Spirits Across Seven Centuries

The Old Catholic Church on Juffrouw Idastraat is a hidden church dating from 1722. You seem to be entering an ordinary townhouse, but at the end of the corridor you find yourself in one of the finest Baroque church interiors in the Netherlands.

In this hidden gem, guest curator Calliope Tsoupaki brings together kindred spirits from across seven centuries. The concert has already started before you enter: in John Cage’s Litany for the Whale, two voices alternate on a melody of five notes. The sea, grief and consolation form the central thread of the concert.

Lamento d’Arianna is all that remains of Monteverdi’s lost opera Arianna. Abandoned on the island of Naxos, Ariadne watches the ship of her beloved Theseus disappear on the horizon and sings out her despair. At the premiere in 1608, the audience was moved to tears. This was the new music of its time: no longer elevated polyphony, but a single voice expressing grief straight from the heart. Opera, as a brand-new genre, was then barely ten years old. By Sigismondo d’India, we hear a madrigal in which all of nature mourns with another abandoned lover. From Sweelinck, we hear poetic arrangements of two French chansons.

Today’s music also features in the programme. Alongside Calliope Tsoupaki’s Fleur Muette for viola da gamba, soprano Lydia Gardiner performs an excerpt from The Zeewijk Passion. This is her own composition about the VOC ship Zeewijk, which was wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1727. Two cabin boys were discovered to be lovers. The crew abandoned them on two uninhabited islands, separated from one another. They shared Ariadne’s fate on Naxos, but in the Indian Ocean.

The oldest kindred spirit honoured by Tsoupaki is Guillaume de Machaut, the fourteenth-century master of the movement known as Ars Nova — the “new art”, a term coined by Philippe de Vitry. His virelai opens with the cry “Ay mi!” — woe is me: a single voice expressing grief. What seemed like a revolution in Monteverdi in 1608 had already sounded more than two centuries earlier. New music is older than you think.