Conductor Lawrence Foster also has a flourishing European career, having appeared with orchestras in many countries. He has a large repertory that includes opera and stretches from the Classical era to contemporary works.

Foster was born in Los Angeles on October 23, 1941. His parents were Romanian immigrants. Foster's father died when he was three, and he was adopted by his mother's second husband and given that man's surname. Foster took piano lessons in Los Angeles from Joanna Grauden and studied conducting with Fritz Zweig, making an unusually early conducting debut at 18 with a Los Angeles youth orchestra and being named conductor of the San Francisco Ballet that same year. Remaining in that position until 1965, Foster took further conducting lessons from Karl Böhm, Bruno Walter, and Franz Waxman, among others, also traveling to the Bayreuth Festival in the early '60s for its conducting master classes. Foster was named assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in 1965. That year, he conducted the world premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's Tragoedia, and he has retained a strong commitment to new works. Studying at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts in 1966, he received the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize. In 1969, he became the chief guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic in Britain. His opera career began in that country with appearances at the Scottish Opera in 1974 and at Covent Garden in London in 1976. Among Foster's early recordings was one of works by Gershwin with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, released on the Erato label in 1983.

Foster began his career as the music director with that orchestra and went on to many other music director posts, including those at the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalunya, and the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon, among other groups. He was the principal conductor of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, and in 2013, he became the music director of Orchestre et Opéra National de Montpellier. As of the early 2020s, he was music director of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille in France. His career in opera has been nearly as extensive, including stints at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Houston Grand Opera, and both the Opéra-Comique and Opéra Bastille in Paris, and he served as the music director of the Opéra de Marseille. Foster has an extensive recording career, having appeared on EMI, Teldec, PentaTone Classics, and many other labels. In 1997, he led the premiere recording of Paul McCartney's oratorio Standing Stone with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. By 2023, when he led the Gulbenkian Orchestra with violinist Arabella Steinbacher on a recording of violin concertos by Bruch and Korngold on PentaTone, his recording catalog comprised more than 75 albums. ~ James Manheim