The trailblazing conductor at the Proms
As she prepares for the Proms, Jane Glover tells Ben Lawrence about the many years she spent as the only female conductor around
Jane Glover has, for decades, been part of a rare breed. While in 2018 we are still at a point where female conductors are very much in the minority, Glover has been leading orchestras since the Seventies, including Glyndebourne and Berlin Staatsoper. In 2013, she was only the third woman to conduct at the Met in New York and won critical plaudits in doing so.
Meeting Glover today at her London home I wonder whether the 69-yearold – who brims with confidence and has a rather headmistressy air – has ever had doors slammed in her face.
“I still don’t know how to answer that question except to give you the long view from my dotage,” she says. “I expect there have been occasions where I have not got work because I am a woman, but there could have been occasions where I got work because I am a woman. Both are lamentable – the only thing that matters is whether you can do it.”
Glover does concede, however, that the media has always singled her out on account of her gender. “Because, for years, I was the only one around there was a certain amount of publicity. People were writing about my clothes and my hair and my size, and not paying any attention to whether the music was any good.” When she appeared on Desert Island
Discs back in 1986, Glover jauntily said to the then-host Michael Parkinson that she expected the show would have lots of female conductor castaways in years to come. Sadly, this has proved unprophetic, although Glover is keen not to sound negative.
“There are more than you think. There is Mirga [Gražinytė-tyla] at Birmingham and the great beacon is Marin [Alsop], who is so full of energy and so damned good. If there are enough of us, we can nurture those coming through.”
She sounds slightly testy when I suggest that her chosen profession might be more suited to the aggressive egomania of a certain type of redblooded male.
“Generalisations are reductive,” she says crisply. “It’s like saying that all violinists sound the same. There are tough women and there are tough men and there are gentle women and there are gentle men.”
Glover believes she has had to be tough, and certainly I get the impression she takes no prisoners. This is, however, tempered by an evangelical enthusiasm for her work, something which has perhaps stemmed from her childhood. As the daughter of the headmaster of Monmouth School, Glover was introduced to the cream of the classical music world when the Welsh Arts Council started to use the school hall for concerts put on by their newly formed music society. Among the greats she met during this time were Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Janet Baker, the Amadeus Quartet and, most inspirationally, Benjamin Britten.
“He changed my life,” she says. “It has often been told how wonderful he was with young boys, but let me tell you he was wonderful with this fat schoolgirl, too.”
Despite these brushes with greatness and a fairly pukka education (the local private girls’ school followed by Oxford), it would be unfair to say that Glover had a privileged musical education exactly. She talks of a “remote musical childhood”: “I always think of my colleagues who grew up in London, who could go to 12 concerts a week if they wanted to.” Glover also admits she struggled at Oxford when she found that everybody else studying music had been “exposed to five-part counterpoints since they were eight years old. For them it was part of their language, but for me it was like learning ancient Greek. I felt I was having to catch up all the time.”
Music education in the 21st century, she says, is a cause for concern. “It is still a postcode lottery and still down to how much peripatetic teaching your local authority provides. Picking up a violin may not be everyone but if there is no opportunity to do so then a lot of people will fall through the cracks.”
Whether through talent or perseverance or more likely a combination of both, Glover went on to achieve great things in her chosen field and for a time in the Eighties was the BBC’S face of classical music, hosting several TV series, including a documentary about her beloved Mozart. Indeed, she has been called “one of the finest Mozartians of her day”, and in 2008 wrote an acclaimed work about the women in Mozart’s life.
Now, a decade later, she has written another book, Handel in London, which focuses on how the composer followed his princely master, the Elector of Hanover (later our George I), to England and flourished at the heart of English musical society. He composed masterpiece after masterpiece, including Zadok the Priest and the Messiah, and Glover attempts gets to the nub of the enigmatic composer, who, unlike the prolific Mozart, has left behind just 14 extant letters, which are furthermore all in French, neither the German’s first language nor the one he adopted.
Among other things, she refutes the claims that he was gay, saying that he was such a celebrity of the time that there would have been some indication of it. “He was just a very private person who was quite happy in his own company.”
Glover also talks of a shrewd businessman who invested in the South Seas but sold his shares before the crash and of a “fabulous, huge charismatic presence who would suck the oxygen out of a room when he entered it”.
Before Handel in London is published next month, Glover can be seen at the Proms, directing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury in the cavernous environs of Alexandra Palace. As a Mozart and Handel specialist, Glover gleefully relishes the prospect of being out of her comfort zone. She has conducted the Victorian operettists before at the Proms, although she shudders at the memory of a disastrous production of Princess Ida she worked on at English National
‘It’s like saying that all violinists sound the same. There are tough women and there are gentle women’
Opera in 1992, directed by Ken Russell.
“It was a nightmare,” she says. “He was such a lovely man but after lunch, which was very liquid, he was useless. And then the designer who had been given a budget greater than he was used to went mad. I mean it was just a horror.”
Glover can understand why there is a certain amount of snobbery surrounding Gilbert and Sullivan, blaming the proliferation of badly done amateur productions. However, she also points out the brilliance of the orchestration, of the libretto and its tendency to raise the spirits.
“It is impossible to be in a bad mood when I’m conducting Gilbert and Sullivan,” she says.
So if you’re in north London on Saturday and feeling glum, Jane Glover will provide the perfect antidote.
Trial by Jury will be performed at the Proms on Saturday at Alexandra Palace (royalalberthall.com/tickets) Handel in London is published by Pan Macmillan on Sept 20