Tom Huizenga
Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.
Joining NPR in 1999, Huizenga produced, wrote and edited NPR's Peabody Award-winning daily classical music show Performance Today and the programs SymphonyCast and World of Opera.
He's produced live radio broadcasts from the Kennedy Center and other venues, including New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge, where he created NPR's first classical music webcast featuring the Emerson String Quartet.
As a video producer, Huizenga has created some of NPR Music's noteworthy music documentaries in New York. He brought mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato to the historic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, placed tenor Lawrence Brownlee and pianist Jason Moran inside an active crypt at a historic church in Harlem, and invited composer Philip Glass to a Chinatown loft to discuss music with Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange).
He has also written and produced radio specials, such as A Choral Christmas With Stile Antico, broadcast on stations around the country.
Prior to NPR, Huizenga served as music director for NPR member station KRWG, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and taught in the journalism department at New Mexico State University.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Huizenga's radio career began at the University of Michigan, where he produced and hosted a broad range of radio programs at Ann Arbor's WCBN-FM. He holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan in English literature and ethnomusicology.
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A fearless risk-taker who makes warhorses sound freshly minted, Kopatchinskaja, from her Vienna apartment, sets fire to Beethoven and offers rarely heard American music.
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On her new album, the opera star suggests Mother Nature has a lot to teach us, if we'd only listen. -
Violin and cello are sparkling stand-ins for the Andean charango in an evocative serenade by Gabriela Lena Frank.
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Hear the French harpsichordist's monument to silence in a luminous and expansive performance from Bach's Goldberg Variations.
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Opera and cabaret comingle when two odd bedfellows bring music by Philip Glass, The Bangles, Peter Gabriel and Christoph Willibald Gluck to a "tiny apartment" in Manhattan.
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Broadcast nationwide in 1934 and praised by listeners and critics alike, a masterful symphony soon fell silent. A new recording hopes to help revive an American treasure. -
Hear a sparkling new chamber piece that, by design, explores the idea of being together.
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On Oct. 19, 1814, an Austrian teenager named Franz Schubert wrote "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel," a boldly innovative song that remains an inspiration for singers and songwriters. -
Hear an ode to the air we breathe from the innovative electro-acoustic composer, with an assist from a children's choir.
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George Walker's final Piano Sonata might be short in length, but it's long on ideas, unfolding in a colorful thicket of textures and episodes.
