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 new video, featuring a score by Steven Mackey with Jason Treuting, retells the ancient tale of love, loss and the power of music.
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Watch the two musicians, nearly 50 years apart in age, talk about the pains of striking out on your own, the pulse of New York, and the role of the artist today. Plus about a hundred other ideas.
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If you've never heard For Bunita Marcus, pianist Marc-André Hamelin predicts it'll be either the most aggravating thing you've ever heard, or the best migraine medicine you've ever had. -
The crackdown on the star conductor's four-city American tour with the National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is seen as payback for his recent criticisms of the Maduro government.
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The adventuresome ensemble, along with a science-friendly composer, transforms the rare solar event into music in real time.
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The famous 89-year-old pianist has spent a lifetime perfecting Chopin. Along the way, the composer has reached out from the great beyond in a few startling ways.
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"Light Blooms In Hollow Space" isn't overly complicated — no need to overthink the quiet power of a musically evocative space and the heart-melting melody that overtakes it.
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Three hundred years ago, England's embattled King George I decided to divert public attention from the country's woes with a big musical party on the River Thames.
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On a new album, the Grammy-winning Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir sings new music by native son Tõnu Kõrvits and probes the windswept melancholy of the 19th-century English author's poetry.
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The conductor, who cut his tenure short as the New York Philharmonic's music director, finds a welcoming new home — with a glitzy new concert hall — in Hamburg, Germany.
