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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Hear music both bleak and magisterial by an Icelandic composer and engineer who wields darkness into a singularly mesmerizing art.
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The opera, by the 39-year-old Shanghai native, is a searing parable of human trafficking set to a score that ranges from Renaissance choral music to punk rock. -
The anonymous song from 17th-century Iceland sports a catchy, bittersweet melody that pop outfits like Peter, Bjorn and John might be happy to whistle. Arve Henriksen joins the vocal trio on trumpet.
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Despite a misleading article, the beloved soprano makes it clear that she's nowhere near ready to give up the opera stage.
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The genre-busting composer, who believes in classical music's "multi-dimensional space," brings a strikingly diverse playlist with him for a relaxed session of spinning tunes and talking music.
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After the death of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko on April 1, we revisit a 2000 feature about his most famous work, 'Babi Yar,' and the collaboration it inspired with composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
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The collaborative spirit of Black Mountain College — once home to the likes of John Cage and Willem de Kooning — lives on in a theatrical song cycle performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
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One of the finest, most ravishing, cello concertos so far this century, written for and performed by Yo-Yo Ma, finally receives its debut recording.
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The pianist creates a singular electronic language rooted in the past but reaching to the future.
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Piotr Anderszewski is one of the most revered pianists today, and one of the most delightfully unpredictable. His new album links composers with a direct line from brainstorm to masterpiece.
