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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Ron Howard's new Pavarotti film fails to make us feel much for its subject, and does little to bolster the magical, complicated art called opera.
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Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood talks about his classical music featured on NPR Music's Tiny Desk, his love for the recorder and his composer heroes such as Steve Reich and Krzysztof Penderecki.
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Sometimes it takes an outsider to see a culture clearly. Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's Ninth Symphony was an ode to what American music could become.
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If the celebrated cellist could soundtrack his life, the music would be J.S. Bach's six Cello Suites. Yo-Yo Ma explains why they mean the world to him while he played the music at the NPR offices.
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Watch the 19-time Grammy winner return to his lifelong passion for J.S. Bach, playing music from the Cello Suites and offering advice on the art of incremental learning.
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America's top orchestras are presenting little if any music written by women next season. Why is that?
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Watch the Chicago-based ensemble conjure otherworldly sounds from steel pipes, tuned cowbells and a bowl that sings.
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Members of the Danish String Quartet carry on Scandinavian folk traditions by refurbishing old songs and writing a few new ones of their own.
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The Russian baritone known for his burnished voice died Wednesday. He announced in 2015 that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer.
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In 1955, a little known Canadian pianist recorded the Goldberg Variations. The album launched Glenn Gould's career and popularized Bach's music. Now the complete recording sessions have been issued.