WELSH National Opera is on sparkling form for its new production of Verdi’s Otello.

Top-notch soloists and a chorus in fine voice combine with thrilling musicality under Carlo Rizzi’s baton.

The full drama of this tragic tale of love and jealousy is evident from the first stormy bars.

The victorious Otello may steer a safe passage through tempestuous seas to a hero’s welcome and Desdemona’s adoration but Iago’s vindictive plotting awaits. And the terrible descent through destructive emotion into tragedy begins.

Dennis O’Neill invests Otello with the right mix of majesty and vulnerability to make his conversion to suspicious husband believable, especially in the hands of so tricksy an enemy as David Kempster’s Iago.

But, with Amanda Roocroft a heart-stopping Desdemona, it could stretch belief without Verdi’s searing score to underpin the thread of evil that snakes, like the Serpent, into their paradise.

From the complexity of the relationship revealed in Otello and Desdemona’s love duet in Act 1, through the delicacy of the Willow Song and Ave Maria, this is an opera to remind us of Verdi’s greatness.

And to pay tribute to WNO for another masterly production.

Otello is in repertoire with The Barber of Seville and Jenufa, at the Cardiff Millennium Centre this week, Swansea Grand on October 16, 17 and 18, then Bristol, Birmingham and Oxford (among other centres) until December. For full details visit wno.org.uk