Otello is a 153-minute studio album of Gioachino Rossini's opera Otello, performed by José Carreras, Nucci Condò, Salvatore Fisichella, Alfonso Leoz, Keith Lewis, Gianfranco Pastine, Samuel Ramey and Frederica von Stade with the Ambrosian Chorus and the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Jesús López Cobos.

The work was "full of music that [was] mellifluous and affecting", and though it was not the last word in psychological profundity, in between its occasional barren pages there were others that plumbed genuine depths of feeling.

As Desdemona, Frederica von Stade exhibited her "accustomed control and feeling for the shape of a phrase", singing even more beautifully than she had in the excerpt from the opera that she had included in her early recital disc of bel canto arias.

As Emilia, Nucci Condò sang with a voice so like von Stade's that it was sometimes difficult to tell the maidservant from her mistress, though the similarity of their timbres made for an exquisite blending in their Act 1 duet.

With his "pleasingly clean, open tone and rapid vibrato", he negotiated his character's roulades, coloratura and excruciating tessitura with virtually no apparent effort.

The opera's third tenor, Gianfranco Pastine, did well, too, as Iago - a smaller part than in Verdi or Shakespeare - and sang with a timbre that was different enough from Carreras's or Fisichella's to obviate confusion.

The orchestra played attentively, and López Cobos conducted with great skill, emphasizing the moments when Rossini was at his most inspired and making it easy to overlook passages in which the composer's powers of fantasy had faltered.

Rossini had given Desdemona "many long-lined, plaintive melodies", and von Stade "[span] them out beautifully, always with full attention to the meaning of the words and" - pace Blyth - "with excellent diction."

Philips had been shrewd in casting the album's three principal tenor roles, choosing singers with voices that were easy to tell apart from one another and that were well suited to the different kinds of music that Rossini had written for them.

José Carreras came to the title role with a voice that had lately "grown somewhat darker and heavier", but it "retained its sweetness and inherent beauty of tone".

Samuel Ramey, the opera's solitary, "sonorous" bass, supplied the somber tints that were needed to complete Rossini's chiaroscuro.

Philips's production team had done their work admirably, balancing soloists and orchestra unimpeachably and making intelligent use of the stereo soundstage to create the illusion of a theatrical presentation without perpetrating any obtrusive trickery.

On the positive side, the opera contained "genuine inspiration" and several kinds of beauty, from the "brilliance and ornamentation" of its Act 1 quartet to the "unadorned, unaffected simplicity of utterance" of the Willow Song and Prayer.

Its Act 3 was so powerful that it had long deterred Verdi from beginning his own Otello, but the rest of the opera was "flashy rodomontade" with "the odd mauvais quart-d'heure".

Salvatore Fisichella and Gianfranco Pastine emerged "with honour, barely bloodied and never for a moment bowed" by Rossini's merciless demands on their virtuosity.

Conducting, López Cobos had found a way to maintain the impetus of the opera's drama while at the same time allowing his singers the opportunity to let Rossini's bel canto work its magic.