Jane Glover never tires of the joys of Mozart.

        “It doesn't come much greater than this,” the conductor says.

        Dr. Glover, one of the world's most respected interpreters of Mozart, will be conducting when Cincinnati Opera opens The Marriage of Figaro Thursday.

Conductor Jane Glover rehearses with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

        “What Mozart does to enhance the characterization in the music is just unbelievable,” Dr. Glover says. “That's the great joy for us, to bring all that to life.”

        The conductor, a native of the United Kingdom with a doctorate from Oxford, was awestruck in her first visit to Music Hall last week. (“It's huge, absolutely enormous.”) She was also fretting about having just two rehearsals with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra before the production opens — “barely enough time,” she says.

        Figaro, the first opera she conducted as a 21-year-old student at Oxford, is a mainstay of her repertoire — a wide-ranging array from Monteverdi to Benjamin Britten. She's planning to conduct the score from memory.

        “In every rehearsal you find something new,” she says enthusiastically, with a precise English accent. “It's like reading Hamlet, or walking through Venice. Every time you do it, you notice something else.”
       

Comedy in Mozart
       

        Favorite moments are hard to choose. Take the overture, for instance.

        “Normally, overtures would start with big chords to make everybody shut up and pay attention,” she says. “But by starting (softly), he is challenging the audience to listen differently. (Mozart) makes the audience work and be part of this great revolutionary process.”

IF YOU GO

What: Cincinnati Opera, The Marriage of Figaro; Jane Glover, conductor; Mike Ashman, director.     When: 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday     Where: Music Hall     Tickets: 241-2742 or visit www.cincinnatiopera.com     Read the review: Friday on www.enquirer.com and Sunday in Tempo

        Mozart discarded the conventional Italian opera overture (fast-slow-fast). Instead, he wrote a scintillating little piece that begins breathlessly — perfectly setting the scene for love triangles, jealous scheming, mistaken identities and amorous entanglements. An opera buffa, Figaro is, after all, taken from Beaumarchais' play, The Crazy Day.

        Set in 18th-century Spain, it opens on the servants Figaro and Susanna, preparing for their wedding day. But their employer, Count Almaviva, has designs on Susanna. Further, the Count's infidelities are distressing to his wife, the Countess. She and the two servants enlist the young page, Cherubino, to hatch a plan to restore the Count's faithfulness to his wife. The result is a lighthearted comedy of mistaken identities and intrigue — enhanced by the genius of Mozart and his ability to cut to the heart of each character.

        Then there's the Act II finale: “just one of the greatest pieces of anything ever written,” Dr. Glover says. It starts as a duet, gathering steam as each character joins in, until it climaxes in a great septet — with each character commenting individually on the complicated situation.

        While Mozart's music is “beautiful, heart-rending and funny,” she believes the opera was also dangerous for its time. The idea of servants mocking their aristocratic masters was a revolutionary thought in 1786. Beaumarchais' play was banned from Vienna, and the opera received only a few performances before it closed in Vienna, some say on orders of the emperor.

        “All that's in there. And yet, it is still a comedy,” she says.
       

Conducting in Chicago
       

        Dr. Glover has just completed six “very hectic months,” in which she conducted Mozart's Cosi fan tutte with Chicago Opera Theater in January, using period instruments. After that, came Handel's Messiah in February in Chicago, Handel's Agrippina with New York City Opera in April and Monteverdi's Orfeo at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the same month.

        Her most recent Figaro is one she might like to forget: a futuristic, Rocky Horror Picture Show-style production mounted by English National Opera in December, which featured a rubbish heap for the set, and dressed the cast in Star Wars get-ups.

        “Best was the lithe playing of the ENO orchestra — beautifully conducted by Jane Glover,” wrote Marc Bridle for Music on the Web. “She gave a quicksilver performance of the score (from memory), her baton moving as if she was whisking the lightest of cakes.”

        Although she's often regarded as an early music specialist, Dr. Glover shuns labels.

        “I do a lot of contemporary music, although I started as a Baroque specialist,” she says. “When I started, it was very much the time when period instruments were getting going in Europe. I was performing these operas on original instruments — that's really why I got the attention.”
       

Attracting national press
       

        She's been too busy to notice that she is a pioneer, one of a rare few women on the podium, who has attracted the national press from her very first Figaro. The press came again at age 23, when she conducted operas by Cavalli and Monteverdi, a result of her research to “find the scores that hadn't been performed for 300 years, write about them, and to actually put them back in the theater where they belonged,” she says.

        She thinks the idea of women conductors is, nowadays, old news. Still, when she was developing her own career, she had no female role models. She blazed her own trail, learning from mentors such as Bernard Haitink at Glyndebourne, a famed opera house 54 miles south of London. She was Mr. Haitink's assistant, and served as music director of the Glyndebourne Touring Opera from 1981 to 1985.

        “My whole time at Glyndebourne was extraordinary,” she says. “There was someone there who was obviously rather promising. He was called Simon Rattle, this little whiz kid of 19 with curly hair.” (Sir Simon Rattle is now artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic.)

        For seven seasons (1984-91) Dr. Glover was artistic director of the London Mozart Players, with whom she recorded an award-winning series of Mozart and Haydn symphonies for ASV. She made her belated American debut in 1994 at Lincoln Center, at the invitation of soprano Jessye Norman.

        Since then, her American career has boomed; at the moment, she is a candidate for music director of Chicago's Music of the Baroque ensemble.

        “It's true, none of us has yet been appointed to the New York Philharmonic. I don't know when that will be — probably not in my generation. But I think we've come a long way in the 25 years since I've been conducting professionally.”

        Until she finds a permanent podium, there is no better way to make a living than going around the world conducting Mozart operas, she says.

        “We, as audience members learn more about ourselves from watching the apparently ridiculous and unreal antics of these fictional people,” she says. “It's like all great art — ultimately it holds a mirror out to the audience, and it's all about you.”
       

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