Members plugin versus Membership-type plugins

I am using WP as a CMS mainly with a blog for a choir. I would like to have non-choir users able to read the blog and participate if desired (which will require them registering for an account). Also, I need to have a restricted area for the choir members. The restricted choir-member area will have resources for the singers (calendar, mp3 files, mailing list, etc).

I see that I have two types of accounts — a non-choir member account for people participating in the blog and a choir member account that also includes access to the choir-member area. In a perfect world, I would like to have my menu only show choir-member items only to logged in choir-members.

There are quite a few plugins that seem to be in this area and I’m having a hard time trying to differentiate which meets my needs without being overly cumbersome. I also bought a template and I may run into issues with the plugins not working with it (one of the plugins I tried broke my menu formatting).

Any tips? This is my first more involved project with WP as a CMS.