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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Watch the rising young pianist, in a final performance from his Berlin home, make the case for two seemingly disparate French composers born nearly 200 years apart.
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While a valiant endeavor, the Metropolitan Opera's new series of steaming concerts can't seem to shake off opera's fusty, aristocratic traditions. -
The beloved pianist was a young lion of his generation until a hand injury forced him to rethink his relationship to music. -
With the help of a few "wrong" notes, the principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic turned "America the Beautiful" into a solemn protest of police violence.
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Watch the pianist reimagine old spirituals and songs of freedom that continue to resonate in new ways.
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In Our Daily Breather, we ask writers and artists to recommend ways to find calm in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Steve Reich tells NPR Music about his new composition. -
In a new album of keyboard concertos, hear how J.S. Bach's son charted his own startling and original path in music that sparkles with unpredictability -
Grammy-winning fiddler Augustin Hadelich brings one of the finest violins in the world to the Tiny Desk.
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The harpsichord is alive and well. Watch Mahan Esfahani give the first solo harpsichord recital at the Tiny Desk, playing music that spans over 250 years.
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Watch the superstar pianist at home in Shanghai, China, play a soothing Chopin Nocturne and Bach you can dance to.
