It is a hidden gem in The Hague’s city centre: the Old Catholic Church on Juffrouw Idastraat, a clandestine church dating from 1722. You seem to be stepping into an ordinary townhouse, yet at the end of the corridor you suddenly find yourself in one of the most beautiful Baroque church interiors in the Netherlands.

In this church, guest curator Calliope Tsoupaki brings together kindred spirits spanning seven centuries. The concert has already begun as you walk in: in Litany for the Whale by John Cage, two voices alternate on a melody of five notes. The sea, sorrow and solace form the thread running through this programme.

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. She mourns in utter despair. At its premiere in 1608, the audience was moved to tears. This was the new music of its time: not lofty polyphony, but a single voice expressing grief straight from the heart. Opera, as a brand‑new genre, was barely ten years old. From Sigismondo d’India you hear a madrigal in which all of nature mourns with another forsaken lover. From Sweelinck, you hear poetic reworkings of two French chansons.

Music of today also features in the programme. Alongside Tsoupaki’s Fleur Muette for viola da gamba, soprano Lydia Gardiner performs an excerpt from The Zeewijk Passion. It is an original composition about the VOC ship Zeewijk, which perished off the Australian coast in 1727. Two ship’s boys turned out to be lovers. The crew abandoned them on two uninhabited islands, without each other.

The oldest kindred spirit Tsoupaki honours is Guillaume de Machaut, the fourteenth‑century master of the Ars Nova. His virelai opens with the cry “Ay mi!” — Woe is me. Once again, a single voice expresses sorrow. What seemed revolutionary in 1608 with Monteverdi had already sounded more than two centuries earlier. New music is always older than you think.