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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April 14 marks the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. In honor of the occasion, two preeminent Handel musicians explain why the music remains as popular as ever with both performers and audiences.
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The Oslo-based trio of vocalists introduces a Norwegian Christmas tune, as well as a few traditions from their homeland, in NPR's Studio 4A. The group's latest recording has just been nominated for a Grammy Award.
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The city of Chicago has one more thing to boast about: Its hometown orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, has been named America's top orchestra in a new critics' poll published in the venerable British magazine Gramophone.
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The Beaux Arts Trio, with founder Menahem Pressler, will play its final U.S. concert at the Tanglewood Music Festival on Thursday night, 53 years after the group got its start there. The farewell performance will stream live at NPR.org.
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Imagine a grand piano with the top removed. Armed with fishing line, plumbing tape and Popsicle sticks, 10 musicians lean over the innards of the instrument and play the bowed piano.
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Beverly Sills, world-renowned opera singer, died from lung cancer at the age of 78. With a silvery voice that soared high, and an irrepressible personality, Sills became an opera superstar.
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Debussy's groundbreaking work La Mer helped usher in the modern era of classical music and broke new ground in orchestration.
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The polarizing opera singer may be gone, but she is not forgotten. Callas died 27 years ago. When she was alive and singing, she was the opera diva many people enjoyed criticizing.
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To mark the 100th anniversary of composer Aram Khachaturian's birth, NPR's Tom Huizenga profiles the man behind "Sabre Dance".