So kind of you to post this, @sergeantedward — glad you could make it!

By the way Nihil— if you’d like any noise reduction on any of them, I could help. As long as I can sample one or two seconds of the baseline hiss in the background, that can be tampered down quite a bit by a special spectral noise plugin I have. (I noticed it at the beginning of Conditor Alme Siderum) But the music is beautiful. Simply stunning.

@davido - great questions!

A bit of background -- for years, the choir at OSM was an all-professional quartet (or quintet) choir, without any volunteers at all. When I arrived, I allowed for auditioned volunteers to join the group. The auditions are not terribly demanding, and just make sure that the contribution will be net positive to both the group dynamic (in terms of learning speed and morale) and the sound.

This mixed pro / auditioned volunteer group is our primary choir, the "Choir of the Cincinnati Oratory," and sings for Sundays and most feasts. The choir in this recording is the professional subset of that choir, the "Oratory Singers". I use this perhaps nonstandard nomenclature, despite both groups being, properly speaking, scholae cantorum, to disambiguate completely from our children's "schola", which was founded cooperatively with a gifted music educator and parishioner when I arrived, which aims to create a pipeline of trained singers for the music at the Oratory parishes.

Our sister parish, also served by the Oratory, has a more "catch-all" choir establishment that doesn't move through repertoire as quickly and focuses very heavily on mastery of the basics. Whilst I have thankfully been able to accept most people who wish to volunteer for the Oratory Choir, those I have not, if they're obviously serious about learning to sing, I almost always refer in that direction.

If that is not a satisfactory solution, and they really wish to sing precisely at OSM, the men are always welcome to take part in Sunday Vespers, sung in Gregorian chant in the sanctuary, or to join the less-musically-demanding choir for the German Mass, which presents choral offerings in addition to the robust congregational hymnody.

We also have a pick-up choir for summer Sundays that is less demanding and which I use as a long audition / soft trial for people who aren't sure of whether it's a good fit for them. Because, generally speaking, people who ask to join hear us every Sunday and know how demanding what they're getting in to is going to be. Nine times out of ten, I'm not telling someone overagainst their protestations that they don't have the right stuff -- rather, they realize, in the course of the audition or over the summer, that it's not a good fit.