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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From Queen Victoria's funeral to a tour of Maria Callas' Paris apartment, a British newsreel archive has just uploaded 85,000 historic films to YouTube. Watch a few of our favorite music clips. -
A newly reissued set of symphonies from the decades after World War II recovers a gifted yet neglected composer, Vadim Salmanov. These live recordings burn with intensity and sorrow.
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Know your bird calls from barnyard bellowing? For Earth Day, test your ear at recognizing the animal sounds songwriters and composers work into their music, from funk classics to classical sonatas.
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Join tenor Ian Bostridge, conductor Ton Koopman and other singers, conductors and scholars for a guided tour of Bach's sacred masterpiece, first heard on Good Friday in Leipzig in 1727.
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Alaska-based composer John Luther Adams, whose music is rich with references to and concern about nature, won for his orchestral Become Ocean. The judges said it "suggests a relentless tidal surge."
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The pianist, the composer, his tunes and her talent. On her new album Chasing Pianos, pianist Valentina Lisitsa plays the propulsive, evocative music of Michael Nyman's film scores.
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He's a young tenor with an old-school style and all the world's top opera houses want him. Calleja's expressive shading and dynamic control hearken back to an earlier era — and he's funny.
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Are you brainy when it comes to Bach, or bamboozled? Know your cantatas from your concertos? Match your wits against the granddaddy of composers in this 'Big Bach' puzzler.
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Sample a trio of new vocal albums ranging from a blistering Beethoven Mass to ancient Russian Orthodox traditions and an opulent but overlooked opera from the dawn of the 20th century.
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Know your shamrocks from rock bands, crooners from composers? See how green you really are by taking this interactive St. Patrick's Day puzzler.
