<aside> <img src="/icons/hand_gray.svg" alt="/icons/hand_gray.svg" width="40px" /> WELCOME and thank you for attending tonight’s performance from Westmoreland Festival Chorus. Use this page to follow along with the program, learn more about our work, and that of our beneficiary, Bethesda Cares.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/currency_gray.svg" alt="/icons/currency_gray.svg" width="40px" /> For over 30 years Bethesda Cares has worked to raise the level of care for individuals experiencing homelessness throughout Montgomery County. Please give generously, as you are able, to support this important work. All donations are tax deductible. Learn more at https://bethesdacares.org/
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https://bit.ly/WFC-even-in-silence
<aside> <img src="/icons/profile_gray.svg" alt="/icons/profile_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Welcome to Westmoreland UCC! We are an open and affirming congregation that values community, inclusivity, and social good. Westmoreland Festival Chorus is an outreach program of the congregation comprising the singers from the Sunday Chancel Choir along with members of the community. We present free concerts which raise funds for local charitable organizations.
Most of us have at least heard the dramatic opening “O Fortuna!” in soundtracks, commercials, or parodies; a further reading of the text vividly portrays the fickle nature of fortune, the joys and sorrows of love, and the everchanging dance of constant change. These extremes of life comprise the rota fortunae, that perpetually turning “wheel of fortune” that delivers both despair and ecstasy; and while it seems easy enough to wish we had more of one and less of the other, they are all vital aspects of what it means to experience aliveness. When we take the opportunity to reflect on this and accept that this wheel pushes and pulls each of us, we can make concerted efforts to care for one another on our shared journey. This is why we will take up a collection for Bethesda Cares, and the work they do in our own community to ensure that those experiencing homelessness have hope and help as they contend with this turn of the wheel.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/camera_gray.svg" alt="/icons/camera_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Note on Photos / Video: please feel welcome to take photos and short video of tonight’s concert! We’d love for you to share them around, and would love even more if you share them with us! Click this link to see some of our photos as well, and please upload your own to the album so we can see them. Thanks!
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Full Ensemble
| O Fortuna, velut Luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis; vita detestabilis nunc obdurat et tunc curat ludo mentis aciem, egestatem, potestatem dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis, status malus, vana salus semper dissolubilis, obumbrata et velata michi quoque niteris; nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris.
Sors salutis et virtutis michi nunc contraria est affectus et defectus semper in angaria. Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite; quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite! | O Fortune, Like the moon You are changeable, ever waxing and waning. Hateful life, first oppresses, and then soothes as fancy takes it; poverty, and power it melts them like ice.
Fate - monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent, well-being is in vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game I bring my bare back To your villainy.
Fate is against me in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved. So at this hour without delay pluck the vibrating strings; since Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me! | | --- | --- |
Full Ensemble