One of the chief pleasures of this live production of Otello from the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden is Daniel Barenboim's conducting. From the opening gale-force blast of storm music, through the crunching and stabbing accompaniment of Iago's "Credo" to the shimmering strings of Desdemona's "Willow Song", he doesn't miss a trick. Everything works at the highest pitch of intensity and the orchestra sticks to his beat like glue. It's a necessary compensation for the shortcomings of the staging: the stolid chorus remains unperturbed by the storm and is directed to perform with unison movements; the acting (apart from Valeri Alexejev) is non-committal, and Alexandre Tarta's video direction somewhat flat-footed. She doesn't manage to make much small-screen sense of an impenetrably murky opening scene, for example, and doesn't seem fond of reaction shots. That said, Christian Franz and Emily Magee both have large-scale voices that they know how to shade into mo! ments of intimacy, and George Tsypin's sets are impressive: the murder of Desdemona is set against a brilliant lake of fire.

On the DVD: Otello is presented in 1.78:1 ratio with PCM Stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound options. The picture quality is clear, although much of the lighting of this live production is low-level and thus many details do not come over well. Nor does the stage microphone system avoid some muffling of sound. There are subtitles in Italian, English, German, French and Spanish. --Warwick Thompson