With the new Zeffirelli EMI Otello still resounding in the public ear and eye, and with AB's declaration (10/86) that Maazel's recording is just about the most exciting since Toscanini, what hope for an earlier Domingo performance? There is no doubt that eight years ago Domingo himself was less than ripe for the part: there are some missed opportunities for modulation of timbre (how bland, for instance, his ''Onesto Iago'' sounds now) and, in a less tautly inflected vocal line, there is some sense of constraint, particularly at the top of the register. But the performance should not be under-rated in its own right. Domingo offers passionately engag ed singing within what is a perfectly scaled performance.
The real advantages of this recording (apart from its medium price) are to be found elsewhere. The impetus and detail of Levine's direction are both sharpened in a digital remastering which also conveniently fits the entire opera, act by act, on to four sides (as with the new EMI recording). But its greatest strength lies without doubt in the extraordinary presence of Sherrill Milnes's Iago. The strangely equivocal nature of the character worms its way through his very first, sidling lines to Roderigo; and in the unsettling sense of yearning, even tenderness, which Milnes finds in the line, suspense is ubiquitous. This Iago is a man of many dimensions: above all, less a monster than an entirely credible man, over-thirsty for a life in which his energies are inadequately channelled, his vision of ''la mort e nulla'' shuddering with resentment.
No less intelligent and vocally enriching is Renata Scotto's Desdemona: no slip of a girl, to be sure, but a woman very much in touch with her own emotions, and with the lower part of the voice in particular catching the minutest flux of indignant anger, and wounded pride in the Act 3 duet. There are signs of the characteristic wide vibrato at the top; but even this is cunningly and affectingly exploited.
With Jean Kraft's Emilia as forceful in nature as in name, with a youthful Roderigo in Paul Crook and a vulnerable, ingenuous Cassio in Frank Little, there is enough of interest here to ensure that no bargain-hunter feel unduly hard done by.'