Our Future in Your Hands is a work for orchestra, choir and three soloists created by award-winning young composer Kate Whitley together with poet and director Laura Attridge. Inspired by the seismic global youth movement against climate change championed by Greta Thunberg, it will be performed in St John's Church at Buxton International Festival between Sunday 10 and Sunday 17 July 2022.
The Festival Orchestra with members from the Northern Chamber Orchestra and BIF's Young Instrumentalist Programme come together with a choir of 100 pupils dawn from local schools in and around Buxton for this epic work which imagines the world recovering from climate change and being reborn in the future.
The young voices are divided into two choirs, one representing the voice of anger and protest and the other the voice of optimism and change for the future. Three soloists - soprano Fiona Finsbury, mezzo-soprano Rhiannon Doogan and baritone Christopher Cull - portray an astronaut, looking down to Earth from space and seeing the world as a whole for the first time, a man deciding whether or not to have a child, and a woman struggling to find water and survive in an apocalyptic future. Through their stories and the choir's protest songs, Our Future in Your Hands takes us on a journey from terror and destruction to imagining how the world could be if we survived and recovered.
Our Future In Your Hands was commissioned by the Buxton International Festival in collaboration with the Royal Over-Seas League and with support from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. The Trust has assisted several of Kate's projects and commissions as part of her BBT Special Award 2014.
Thanks to the PRS Foundation, Granada Foundation, Golden Jubilee Trust (via ROSL), The D'Oyly Carte Charitable Trust, Ida Carroll Trust, Borletti-Buitoni Trust, Samuel Gardener Memorial Trust, Andre Bernheim Trust, RVW Trust, The Michael Guest Charitable Foundation, Orchestras Live.
Thanks also to members of the Our Future in Your Hands Syndicate, in memory of Emilie Schmid-Tröndle.
Box Office
Tickets cost £20 to £25.
Tel: 01298 72190
www.buxtonfestival.co.uk