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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Plagues and epidemics are ages-old phenomena. They've triggered both fear and inspiration. NPR's Tom Huizenga surveys musical responses from composers over the centuries. -
Known early on for his avant-garde works, the composer's challenging music nevertheless found fans far beyond traditional classical music circles. -
On his new album, the rising pianist once called "Iceland's Glenn Gould" offers a dialogue between two radical French composers born nearly 200 years apart. -
In a time of striving to keep ourselves and our environments pathogen-free, Our Daily Breather seeks guidance on the health of the psyche. Tom Huizenga has been turning to a calming piano performance.
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The English composer's supernova hit continues to obscure his jaunty, folk inflected St. Paul's Suite. -
Watch the award-winning pianist play a hit by Chopin, a premiere by Thomas Adès and a cherished song by Gershwin dressed in a virtuosic arrangement.
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The star singer, who has been the subject of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, will not be singing in a production of Verdi's Don Carlo this summer. -
Thomas Adès' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra riffs on the old classics while speaking in the distinctive voice of a 21st century master composer. -
A thoughtful musician from a distinguished family, Serkin interpreted the classics and expanded the repertoire by commissioning new works. -
A listener's guide for the opera-curious includes a little history, a little trash-talk and some gorgeous singing.
