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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NPR's resident classical music specialist Tom Huizenga previews two of the albums he's looking forward to spending time with in 2021. -
NPR Music's classical editor traces the high points of a year spent listening to new albums that offered comfort and confrontation in counterpoint with the relentless world outside the headphones. -
Growing up in a progressive city, Ludwig van Beethoven embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that shook Europe and helped shape the composer's music.
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Join cellist Jan Vogler and pianist Alessio Bax at the "doctor's office," where they make the case for Beethoven as the liberator of the cello by playing music from his cello sonatas.
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Members of the celebrated Borromeo String Quartet – playing it safe with masks – unlock the sillier side of Beethoven in music he wrote late in life.
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To mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, pianist Jonathan Biss explores the solitary side of the composer in extraordinary music written after Beethoven became deaf.
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From her home in Germany, the provocative American soprano delivers songs of introspection and freedom from Franz Schubert's mountaintop epiphany to Billy Taylor's wish for equality and justice.
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A trio of musicians gather at Aaron Copland's longtime home. Watch them play the iconic American composer's music at his own piano and beside his own writing desk.
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The celebrated soprano died suddenly a year ago, leaving her fans, including one NPR producer, in grief, but with many fond memories. -
When young composers explore old musical formulas, exciting things can happen. Mass for the Endangered is a contemporary twist on an ancient tradition.
