it’s a choral piece. Competent sopranos should be able to sing up to G (although of course many choirs have few competent sopranos, like the one I’m in at the moment…). Or perhaps you mean something else? The tenor has to sing relatively just as high and if I can sing the tenor line, anyone should be able to 
It was both the tessitura and the intervals preceding some of the high notes that prompted my remark. Yes, “competent” singers should be able to sing it; that’s not in question. The question is whether or not you have enough competent singers laying around. I certainly don’t, lol.
Stuttgart has 300 choirs – supposedly the most per head of population in Europe. But you have a fair point – about 280 of them can’t sing reliably in tune so anything a capella would be demanding, never mind anything with the odd larger interval or which isn’t in the style of Protestant Baroque (it’s unfortunately the second most important Bach centre after Leipzig). The work did win a competition, though!
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On the subject of choirs, in England more people are members of vocal groups than attend football (soccer) matches - which is a big number apparently.
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it was suggested that I might make a bit of effort with the reverb and panning so I revisited this and spent 5 minutes setting this in the acoustic of Kings College Cambridge. That’s a bit more like it, I think.
UPDATE
In answer to Dan, other than the fact that high notes by nature tend to appear louder than lower ones, I’d be inclined to agree with you and have rebalanced the overall dynamics a bit - definitely seems better to me now
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Nice. I’ve been thinking the sopranos always sound louder than the men when all levels are supposedly equal. Am I imagining things?
But whatever. For the amount of work involved, these demos are really outstanding.
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No, she’s dominant for sure. Partly tessitura, partly levels, methinks. Do the tracks come out normalized? If not, I’d do that before mixing.
You’re not. Female singers sing louder than we do. Of course, there are exceptions, some men have really loud voices. But they’re exceptions, even in the opera world.
Then, there’s the frequency range where the human ear is the most sensitive, around 2kHz. This is where consonants have their energy, and consonants are what makes a speech intelligible. Guess who sings voyels (not the fundamentals, but the first harmonics are still carrying energy) in that area (and with a singing formant to make it even more powerful)? Sopranos 
That is why (quite simply put) they are always louder.
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Any chance of a source on those figures? Very interested! 
In many years of mixing live choral recordings I find that the Sopranos’ fundamental around F at the top of the staff (700 Hz*) easily overpowers other frequencies. I think it’s due to the natural resonance of the average human anatomy. Male singers with louder voices (as Marc mentions above) resonate with harmonics in the same band, about a 3rd between E and G, and to some extent the octave above.
(* Edit: originally wrote 1400 in error)
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Hi Mark, could you elaborate please…I thought a fundamental was the lowest perceived partial of a tone…1400 Hz is F6. Isn’t that an overtone? Do you use EQ to lower the energy at that frequency when mixing SATB?
I certainly do. I’ve found my voice has a particular resonance (sinuses, I suppose) between 800-1khz depending on which key I’m singing in. It’s a bit subtle in the following screenshot, but you can see from this waterfall view (ie-a “heat map” measured in time) there is a solid line where the purple arrow is pointing.
One way to find these frequencies is to open up an EQ plugin, create a high Q (ie-narrow) filtering band, drag the volume wayyy up and then sweep your audio file. You’ll find that there are strange spots in the spectrum that are very unpleasant. Once you identify those spots, you can then EQ them out. Even if you don’t notice them “in the mix” (ie- when you aren’t cranking them up 15db to make them particularly obnoxious) they are still there. You can do A/B testing before and after filtering them out and usually you can tell a difference. You can really clean up a mix doing this.
Another thing you can do is use a dynamic EQ that takes the signal sends from other channels as a signal when to pull back the problem channels. In the case of the example we’ve been discussing, you could apply a dynamic EQ to the soprano, for instance, that is listening for when the bass is singing, and whenever he sings, it brings the soprano down a few db to help tame her and bring him out at the same time, and because it is dynamic, there is no effect on either voice when the bass is not singing.
I use this trick now on my recordings that have a separate organ track behind the vocals. I’ll tell the organ to listen to the vocal bus, and whenever the voices are singing, it tames the organ slightly behind them so that the voices become more prominent in the mix and the organ becomes less boomy. Then, when there are interludes where the voices aren’t singing, the organ sounds its normal, full self. The effect is subtle, but it makes a huge difference.
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My mistake; I looked up the wrong octave on a tuning app. I did mean 700 Hz. About 680–740, as I recall.
I don’t think I understand much of the past half dozen replies so as punishment, here is another example. The job here for you studio engineers is to take the audio and tame the climax a bit and ensure the remaining dynamics are in balance!
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Nice piece. I was certainly not talking about that kind of singing — more one of a Puccini prima donna (Tosca, Turandot…)
I don’t think there will be serious problems with balance here 
All very impressive and the equal temperament makes it fine for choral music which is atonal, has rapidly changing chromatic harmonies, is being accompanied by piano, etc., but a good choir would never sing traditional harmonies in equal temperament and the lack of pure thirds and fifths makes it sound unnatural to me.
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The same applies to string players in a string quartet, viol consort etc.
And the fact that the intonation of a-capella-choirs does not go flat is also rather unusual
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Robert Hollingworth discusses sharperning/flattening intervals in one of his videos (I can’t find the exact one), but this clip is very amusing if you have a few spare moments to watch it.
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I finally made my first attempt at a cantamus track yesterday morning between masses, and unfortunately for me, there is some glitch, which causes one of the voices to become out of sync with the piano, as though it’s “poly-tempic”. It’s very odd indeed.