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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Georgetown University owes its survival to slavery. A new album by Carlos Simon, an assistant professor at the school, unflinchingly confronts that legacy.
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On a new album, the most accessible so far, the Grammy-winning group reaches out to an EDM wizard, a famous film score composer and Philip Glass.
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The ebullient nonagenarian's new recording features music she's been playing for nearly a century.
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On her new album, the opera star suggests Mother Nature has a lot to teach us, if we'd only listen.
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Hear an ode to the air we breathe from the innovative electro-acoustic composer, with an assist from a children's choir.
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George Walker's final Piano Sonata might be short in length, but it's long on ideas, unfolding in a colorful thicket of textures and episodes.
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Acclaimed for her fearless performances in operas by Strauss and Bizet, Ewing also partly inspired Passing, a film written and directed by her daughter, Rebecca Hall.
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Hear the violinist, celebrated for her beautiful tone, in a surprise gift from a departed composer.
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From NPR's annual list of reading recommendations, Books We Love, we hear four suggestions of history books from 2021.
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The Latvian composer's epic battle of light and dark is a symphonic message about the relationship between humans and nature.