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.
-
Alone amidst the mist and moss near her new home on Ireland's western coast, Savage performs three songs that cohere around the theme of emerging from the darkness of a toxic relationship.
-
If young folks are our future, then classical music looks blazingly bright with these extraordinary performances by teenage musicians from across the country.
-
Tiny Desk heads to Easter Island in the South Pacific for sublime performances by pianist Mahani Teave and a heartwarming story.
-
A visionary who died young and alone in 1990, Eastman is making a slow but richly deserved comeback thanks to a curious younger generation. A new interpretation of his 1974 work Femenine is out now. -
Classical music fans are mourning the loss of the celebrated mezzo-soprano, known for her versatility and the warmth of her voice. She died at her home in Austria on April 24 at age 93. -
The young, late-comer to opera is turning heads in the classical world with a powerful voice that can rocket over huge orchestras or pare down to a silvery thread. -
Watch the composer, in a bucolic southern England setting, play six of his most tranquil, yet probing pieces.
-
NPR's resident classical music specialist Tom Huizenga previews two of the albums he's looking forward to spending time with in 2021. -
Join cellist Jan Vogler and pianist Alessio Bax at the "doctor's office," where they make the case for Beethoven as the liberator of the cello by playing music from his cello sonatas.
-
Members of the celebrated Borromeo String Quartet – playing it safe with masks – unlock the sillier side of Beethoven in music he wrote late in life.
