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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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. -
The revered Cuban composer's winning piece was inspired by the life and struggles of Susan B. Anthony and her own poor mother and grandmother in Cuba.
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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.
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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.
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The gifted conductor who had wielded immense influence in the classical music world, was publicly accused by nine men of sexual abuse. He died March 9 at age 77 of natural causes.
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The Toki School of Music is the brainchild of pianist Mahani Teave, who gave up a promising international career to return to Easter Island to teach children.
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Watch the composer, in a bucolic southern England setting, play six of his most tranquil, yet probing pieces.
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NPR's resident classical music specialist Tom Huizenga previews two of the albums he's looking forward to spending time with in 2021.
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NPR Music's classical editor traces the high points of a year spent listening to new albums that offered comfort and confrontation in counterpoint with the relentless world outside the headphones.
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Growing up in a progressive city, Ludwig van Beethoven embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that shook Europe and helped shape the composer's music.
