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.
-
With the aid of motion capture technology, and an imaginative digital artist, the gestures of the London Symphony Orchestra's conductor are transformed into trippy new animations.
-
The Russian pianist, known for his fiery technique, scales back to let his instrument sing sweetly in an autumnal miniature from late in the career of Johannes Brahms.
-
The legendary diva, who died 40 years ago this year, muses on stardom and fate — both on stage and off — in a luxurious new book of pictures and words.
-
The Prague native was a proud promoter of his country's musical heritage — from Antonín Dvořák to Bohuslav Martinů — with the world's top orchestras.
-
As members of the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet bow their vibraphones, brush their gongs and message their bass drums, the composer's evocative music oozes from blackness.
-
The Crossing, a new music choir from Philadelphia, communes with nature in John Luther Adams' "holy" ode to the wind, the skies and birds.
-
Routinely labeled an "American maverick," Harrison lovingly brought Eastern traditions and the rugged American West together in his music, blazing new paths and constructing his own instruments.
-
Recent surveys show that less than 2 percent of music performed by American orchestras is by women composers. This year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Du Yun, speaks out on diversity in the concert hall.
-
The beloved actor and comedian will debut a new show with cellist Jan Vogler where he sings Gershwin and recites Whitman. There's a little Schubert and Bach on the side.
-
Naturalist and author Lyanda Lynn Haupt took her research on Mozart to a whole new level when she invited a young starling into her home.