[4] The covers of the LP, cassette and CD versions of the album all feature the same photograph, taken by Mike Evans, showing Carreras and von Stade on stage at Covent Garden during the opera's final act.

[4] Alan Blyth reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in October 1981, comparing it with recordings of the opera conducted by Riccardo Chailly[5] and Michel Plasson[6] He approved of most of Davis's principal soloists almost unreservedly.

Thomas Allen's Albert was "ideal", with enunciation as good as Lloyd's and "controlled, velvet tone", a figure as persuasive in his reverent devotion to his betrothed as in his paternalistic concern for his infatuated rival.

As Werther, José Carreras sang with an Italianate timbre, prodigious breath control and meticulous attention to every nuance of Massenet's markings, and also gave a heartfelt performance as an actor.

He was "absolutely inside the role" of the moody, reckless writer, "rich and impassioned in 'O nature', properly distraught and urgent in 'J'aurais' [and] poetic in the Ossian stanzas".

His version of the character was clearly superior to Placido Domingo's vehement but broad-brush portrait for Chailly, and the pointed but reedy-voiced and sometimes self-indulgent performance given by Alfredo Kraus for Plasson.

On the positive side, "the dark timbre of [Carreras's] attractive voice [helped] in creating a manly figure out of Goethe's at times annoyingly self-pitying hero".

His tempi were not the sprightliest ever heard in Werther, but he gave the opera enough momentum to counterbalance its tendency towards a weepy misery, and his reading had certainly gained from the "ensemble spirit" that he had elicited when performing the work at Covent Garden.

In sum, the album was a good one, if arguably not the equal of Georges Prêtre's more animated account with Nicolai Gedda and Victoria de los Angeles.

The Covent Garden orchestra played as well as they knew how, "the solo detail and the velocity of their every response to Massenet's flickering orchestral palette [operating] as if with heightened awareness under the scrutiny of the laser beam".

Colin Davis's conducting paced the opera "superbly", heightening and relaxing the tension of its words and music so that its drama was compulsively engrossing from its first bar to its last.

John Borwick wrote that "It is a studio recording, yet the engineers have recreated the theatrical atmosphere perfectly, with an excellent feeling of distance where appropriate (off-stage voices for example), and the orchestra is beautifully balanced.