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 a deceptive take on the winter blues by way of a versatile choir, a young New York composer and a 150-year-old poem by Longfellow. -
For the sesquicentennial of the composer's birth, Michael Steinberg introduces his proud and sometimes mysterious music, confirming his reputation as one of the greatest symphonists.
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Hear a young conductor, composer and pianist riff on Beethoven and play his own jazz-inspired compositions.
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The Danish composer's evocative song cycle let me tell you features an ingenious mashup of all the words allotted to Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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From an all-Beethoven residency week, hear the storied Berlin Philharmonic play the profound Sixth and witty Eighth with conductor Simon Rattle.
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With minutely detailed instructions from Kiev-born composer Valentin Silvestrov, a British pianist probes the heart of melancholy in music that appears light but weighs heavy.
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In the Philadelphia Orchestra trumpeter's slightly twisted world, bears play bass trombones, Liszt has a brother named Bukhett and snowblowers can be filed as musical instrument deductions.
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Marking the 100th anniversary of An Alpine Symphony, take a guided tour through Strauss' evocative music with conductor Semyon Bychkov and author David Hurwitz as trail guides.
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Conductor Andris Nelsons rallies the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Prokofiev's riotous Alexander Nevsky and makes the orchestra shine in Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances.
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Award-winning pianist Tigran Hamasyan merges ancient sacred hymns from his homeland with improvisation, and a little mystery.
