Acclaimed British conductor Jane Glover, named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year’s Honours, has been Music of the Baroque’s music director since 2002. In 2025, she was named principal guest conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony. She made her professional debut at the Wexford Festival in 1975, conducting her own edition of Cavalli’s LʼEritrea. She joined Glyndebourne in 1979 and was music director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera from 1981 until 1985. She was artistic director of the London Mozart Players from 1984 to 1991. From 2009 until 2016 she was Director of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music, where she is now the Felix Mendelssohn Visiting Professor, and was Visiting Professor of Opera at the University of Oxford, her alma mater.
Jane Glover has conducted many of the major symphony orchestras, chamber orchestras and period instrument groups in Britain, Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia. She has appeared frequently at the BBC Proms.
In demand on the international opera stage, Jane Glover has appeared with numerous companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera–Covent Garden, English National Opera, Glyndebourne, the Berlin Staatsoper, Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera, Opera National de Bordeaux, Opera Australia, Chicago Opera Theater, Opéra national du Rhin, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Luminato, Teatro Real Madrid, Royal Danish Opera, Teatro La Fenice and Detroit Opera. A Mozart specialist, she has conducted all the Mozart operas all over the world regularly since she first performed them at Glyndebourne in the 1980s, and her core operatic repertoire also includes Monteverdi, Handel and Britten. Highlights of recent seasons include The Magic Flute with the Metropolitan Opera; Alcina with Washington Opera; L'elisir d'amore and The Magic Flute for Houston Grand Opera; Medea for Opera Omaha; Così fan tutte for Lyric Opera of Kansas City; The Turn of the Screw, Jephtha and Lucio Silla in Bordeaux; The Rape of Lucretia, A Midsummer Nightʼs Dream, Così fan tutte, Figaro and Don Giovanni at the Aspen Music Festival; Gluck’s Armide and Iphigénie en Aulide with Met Young Artists and Juilliard; Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck) in Lisbon; Albert Herring with Chicago Opera Theater; and Xerxes with Detroit Opera. Among the many operas she conducted while director of opera at the Royal Academy of Music were Eugene Onegin, The Rake’s Progress, The Marriage of Figaro, L’incoronazione di Poppea, and the world premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Kommilitonen! This past season she returned to the Houston Grand Opera and Cincinnati Opera to conduct productions of Don Giovanni and in the 2024–25 season led the North American premiere of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora with Chicago Opera Theater.
Future and recent-past concert engagements include her continuing seasons with Music of the Baroque in Chicago as well as engagements with The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra — both at Severance Hall — as well as the Blossom Music Festival, Orchestra of St. Luke’s (at Carnegie Hall), London Mozart Players, New York Philharmonic, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Camerata Salzburg, and the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Cincinnati, Toronto, Houston, San Francisco, Baltimore and St. Louis, and the Oregon Symphony. In the summer of 2025, she conducted Mozart’s opera The Impresario at the Buxton International Festival in the U.K. and appeared at the Aspen Music Festival and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City.
Jane Glover’s discography includes a live recording of Jeptha with Music of the Baroque on Reference Records, a series of Mozart and Haydn symphonies with the London Mozart Players and various recordings with the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic, Trinity Wall Street and the BBC Singers. She is the author of the critically acclaimed books Mozart’s Women, Handel in London and Mozart in Italy. She holds a personal professorship at the University of London, is a fellow of the Royal College of Music, an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music and the holder of several honorary degrees. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gamechanger Award for her work in breaking new ground for other female conductors. And, in 2025, she received the Musicians Club of Women 150th Anniversary Founders Award. Visit Jane Glover's website here.