Otello (Naples 1816)…has a strong cast, headed by Carreras's searingly noble Moor. The Desdemona is Frederica von Stade: chaste and as luminous as a sculpture in Carrara marble. The set also displays casting in depth. In Rossini's day Naples was awash with great tenors, a situation that nowadays creates prodigious difficulties. Yet both the Iago, Gianfranco Pastine, and the Rodrigo, Salvatore Fisichella, emerge with honour, barely bloodied and never for a moment bowed by Rossini's terrible arsenal of vocal effects. ''They have been crucifying Otello into an opera,'' wrote Byron in 1818. Well, yes and no. By all means treat Acts 1 and 2 as flashy rodomontade, but Act 3 is glorious, inspired enough and sufficiently close to Shakespeare to have been a near fatal deterrant to what Verdi called his own ''chocolate project''. I thrilled to it afresh—off-stage Gondolier and all—in these brilliant new CD transfers. (Richard Osborne, Gramophone)

his disc offers a collection of videos and live performances from the iconic rock band Kiss. The disc offers a standard full-frame transfer. The English soundtrack is rendered in Dolby Digital Stereo. There are neither subtitles nor closed captions on this release.

It is 13 CDs dedicated to some of the most beautiful pages of the concertos for violin and orchestra, ranging from the age 'Baroque to the Romantic period, the first half of the twentieth century, as if to emphasize the unsurpassed expressive ductility of this Polish Master, naturalized Mexican . His performances range from Bach to Bartok, Beethoven and Berg, Brahms and Lalo, from Mendelssohn to Mozart, Paganini to Ravel, Saint-Saens by Khachaturian, from Tchaikovsky to Vivaldi, and so on.