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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Accordionist William Schimmel creates a daring yet touching six-minute distillation of Mahler's mighty Ninth, with detours for tango and trumpet solos by Wynton Marsalis. -
In Philip Glass' music, the pianist shifts between delicate oscillation and stormy arpeggios. -
Watch the piano sensation play scherzos by Chopin, seasonal pieces by Tchaikovsky and Chinese music in conjunction with the Metropolitan's new exhibit China: Through the Looking Glass.
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Florent Ghys' An Open Cage springs from a recording of the maverick composer reading an excerpt from his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). -
The composer is the second from the New York music collective Bang on a Can to win the award with a choral work. Her oratorio explores the lives of coal miners and their families a century ago. -
The modernist composer's solo percussion music — fueled by quick pulses in bongos and the fat punctuations of bass drums — flows in a new recording. -
Simple schemers — or criminal scammers? Try and identify the makers of musical mischief in our April Fools' puzzler. -
From a sensational soprano to an audacious new work for orchestra, NPR Music's Tom Huizenga and host Arun Rath spin a broad selection of new classical albums. -
Our happy duty: finding 10 releases from 2014 that we can't wait to share. -
After decades of performing, the celebrated soprano's enthusiasm for music is irresistible. She chooses some of her favorite recordings for an informal session of listening and conversation.
