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.
-
For a taste of the pianist's technique, here's a lighter mood from Shostakovich that sparkles with interlocking inner voices that ripple as clear as a mountain stream.
-
On his new album, Mozart & Contemporaries, the deep-thinking pianist from Iceland aims to debunk the image of Amadeus as the giggling savant by contrasting his music with that of his peers. -
With bold harmonies, pointillist texture and winding rhythms, Ólafsson's composition offers — in less than two minutes — a distinctly modern sound that looks toward the future.
-
A simple, wistful daydream of a piece that will make you wonder where this undervalued composer has been all your life.
-
Composer Tyshawn Sorey's symphonic salute to one of his mentors, For George Lewis, evolves gradually in tranquil, multi-textured waves of sound.
-
Imagine you're suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. That's what Enigma sounds like.
-
The trailblazing singer, who broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955, is remembered in a deluxe new release of albums and images.
-
This piece, from a new album of orchestral works by Richter, depicts the opening of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway by pairing pulsating rhythms with the composer's signature wistful melodies.
-
Rewind to 1962 where a 20-year-old Barbra Streisand, at the dawn of her spectacular career, takes a solid but unassuming love ballad and displays all the potential of the human voice in three minutes.
-
On March 19, 1968, an amateur recording engineer set up his gear at a coffeehouse in Ottawa. He taped two sets by Joni Mitchell. That recording engineer was none other than Jimi Hendrix,
