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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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Alone amidst the mist and moss near her new home on Ireland's western coast, Savage performs three songs that cohere around the theme of emerging from the darkness of a toxic relationship.
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The link between the award-winning British pianist and the history of this beloved African-American spiritual is deep indeed.
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The musicians of the versatile, Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet have transformed themselves into an electronica-dance-ambient string quartet for their new album, Real Life.
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Known for his idiosyncratic, wide-ranging style and the radical politics of his early years, Louis Andriessen had a profound impact on modern music as an uncompromising creator and prominent teacher.
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If young folks are our future, then classical music looks blazingly bright with these extraordinary performances by teenage musicians from across the country.