Singer mines musical gold from films

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Peter Oprisko

Updated: January 23, 2012 2:50AM

Presenting and preserving great songs is important to Peter Oprisko.

“I will often ask people if they are familiar with the most recent Academy Award-winning song. About 90 percent of my audiences are not,” he says.

So when Oprisko presents “Silver Screen Gold,” a musical salute to classic Oscar-winning songs at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights July 16, he’ll stick to classics, like the 1939 Oscar-winning song, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” from “The Wizard Of Oz,” one of his most requested songs.

“The thing that is really striking about the Oscar-winning songs of the last 10 or 15 years is that they are ephemeral. They are here today and gone tomorrow,” he says.“I never get anyone asking me for the 2005 Oscar winner, ‘It’s Hard Out There For A Pimp.’ ”

His selections for this concert range from the first Academy Award-winning song, “The Continental” from “The Gay Divorcee” in 1934, to “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” in 1969.

“These are tunes that possess that certain timeless quality that sticks with people and transcends generations,” Oprisko says.

Oprisko also discusses the songs’ history and the artists who created and performed them.

“For this program, we like to change things up and give the songs a fresh presentation. For example, ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ (1962) was done as a ballad. I do it as a bossa nova, with an up-beat Latin feel,” he says.

As a child in the 1970s, Oprisko heard these songs from his father’s record collection of such artists as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Mario Lanza and Vic Damone.

“I gained an education through listening to them and I am carrying on the artistry that they established originally. They have all been my teachers, everyone from Mel Torme to Frankie Laine to Nat King Cole to Sammy Davis Jr.”

Before he was a singer, Oprisko hosted two nationally syndicated radio shows, “Exclusively Sinatra” and “Remember When” from station WAIT in Crystal Lake from 1994-2001. When WAIT went to an all-talk format, he gave himself one year to succeed as a singer. That year he booked over 100 performance dates.

“When I first started doing my radio programs, the radio industry were telling me there was no market for this music,” he says. “Twenty years later I am singing this material and doing over 300 engagements a year.”