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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The opera star, with a posse of friends, visits a historic gay bar in Greenwich Village to talk about equality and sing a centuries-old aria that still resonates.
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From a sensational soprano to an audacious new work for orchestra, NPR Music's Tom Huizenga and host Arun Rath spin a broad selection of new classical albums. -
In 1965, a happy accident with tape machines, and the words of a Pentecostal preacher, helped launch the celebrated composer's career.
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By incorporating indigenous sounds and instruments in his music, as well as socio-political themes, the Tasmanian-born composer gave his compatriots a sense of themselves.
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Inspired by ice crystals in the arctic air and the halo-like apparitions they create, composer John Luther Adams' "Sky with Four Suns" blooms with the bright light of 45 cellos.
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The new Amazon series is a comedy, not a reality show — in any way, shape or form. But classical music fans may chuckle knowingly at the trials and tribulations of a young oboist in New York.
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From composers and conductors to instrumentalists, singers and critics, the classical music world said goodbye to many masterful musicians last year.
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Beginning a new year can be fraught with decisions. Discover how great composers chose to start their symphonies and concertos — some with a bang, others a whisper — in this New Year's puzzler.
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Our happy duty: finding 10 releases from 2014 that we can't wait to share.
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It's amazing how satisfying Philip Glass' string quartet music sounds on four guitars. The interlocking parts are transparent and the music seems to breathe.
