Alec R. Costandinos

Alec R. Costandinos has finally done what many of his fans have been requesting for years: reissue Romeo and Juliet and The Hunchback of Notre Dame on compact disc.

Mr. Costandinos is also adding a unique twist by thwarting bootleggers and making the CDs true collector's items by assigning each CD a serial number along with a certificate of authenticity.

A quick history on this project from Alec himself:

For Romeo I couldn't find the Master multi track tapes. For The Hunchback, I couldn't find Esmeralda's dialog. Eventually though, I found ALL the tapes. I tend to blame my irresponsible youth for not having taken better care of my production tapes. For better or for worse I must have done something right because in the end (though dispersed between two continents) I did find all the material.

A great amount of time was invested in bringing the Master tapes back to life. As expected, some individual instrument and vocal tracks did not survive as well as some others. That's just the nature of three and a half decades old 2-inch Ampex magnetic tape. I'm sure you'll let me know if I succeeded in my enterprise. Thank you for your support.

If you've been following the evolution of this project for the past few months, please be aware that these new mixes are not meant to be replicas of the originals. Such an exercise would have been unrealistic. They are new (and relatively close) interpretations using only the original instrumentation and vocals. The BPMs will not match (Romeo and Juliet was accelerated electronically and arbitrarily during the Mastering process in the 1970s and we never kept a record of the exact acceleration percentage) and neither will the overall sound. Choices were made in terms of what should be heard more, what should be heard less and what should not be heard at all. In essence the tracks are the same, but different.