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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Two opera stars conjure the intimate atmosphere of the late 19th-century Parisian salon, telling stories and singing songs by Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Debussy. -
The Pulitzer Prize winner has written pieces inspired by places as far flung as Venice, New Hampshire and a monastery in the mountains of Northern Spain. These dramatically diverse locations spawned picturesque musical ideas ranging from classical to jazz to klezmer.
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"With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come." Those words, from President Obama's first inaugural address, have been set to music on a new album. Celebrating the American Spirit also features Broadway star Kelli O'Hara singing Bernstein.
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We all know about the power of music — the songs that make you happy or trigger a poignant memory. But once in a while music can be even more intoxicating, as in a stunning performance that will be broadcast live to movie theaters worldwide this Saturday.
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What can composers, performers and audiences do to help the music they love thrive? Join a discussion — with prominent musicians like Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Kevin Puts and Jennifer Higdon and conductor Marin Alsop — to help find solutions to classical music's many persistent problems.
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Were you paying attention to what was happening in classical music in 2012? Here's a pop quiz. Try your hand at nailing the big and not so big stories of the past year.
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January is a slow month for new albums. To tide curious listeners over, we offer an exclusive sampler of musical treats soon to come — ranging from opera star Jonas Kaufmann in Wagner to the unlikely pairing of a Bach pianist and a rising singer-songwriter.
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Classical music fans lost far too many musicians in 2012. From towering figures like Elliott Carter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to artists such as innovative American composer William Duckworth, trumpeter Maurice André and the elegant opera singer Lisa Della Casa.
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The flow of good classical Christmas albums seems to have slowed to a trickle. And that's got one holiday listener longing for holiday albums from years past, from Jessye Norman's Christmastide, Duke Ellington's Nutcracker Suite and carols led by Robert Shaw.
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Cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist-composer Thomas Adès play together with uncommon instinct and energy. They shine in a recital of disparate pieces, culminating in a world-premiere recording of an eclectic new work by Adès.
