Conductor Says Orchestra Rescinded Job Offer : The arts: The front-runner for the Pacific Symphony’s vacant music director job asked for a $150,000 salary for the 1991-92 season.

COSTA MESA —  The conductor widely regarded as the front-runner for the job of music director for the Pacific Symphony said Thursday that the orchestra had offered him the job but withdrew the offer last week.

Lawrence Foster, who conducts orchestras in Monte Carlo and Jerusalem, said talks with the Pacific began Dec. 23 but broke down over salary and his request for increased rehearsal time.

“They offered me the job in December,” Foster said from Los Angeles. “I had accepted. Negotiations went extremely far. Then the offer was dropped last week.”

Preston Stedman, head of the Pacific’s search committee, would neither confirm nor deny Foster’s account.

“We don’t want to comment on any statements that any candidates might make,” Stedman said.

Foster said he had asked for a $150,000 salary for the orchestra’s 1991-92 season, which included conducting fees for concerts, an extra fee as music director and a travel allowance.

Keith Clark, the music director the orchestra is trying to replace, was paid $94,094 in 1989, his final year. Louis G. Spisto, the executive director who is now the top-paid employee of the orchestra, made $67,000 in 1989.

“I gave them a total package,” Foster said. “I was given to understand that the board regarded it as too exorbitant.”

Foster, 48, said he had programmed the entire 1990-91 season for the organization in expectation that he would be hired.

“I am brokenhearted,” Foster said. “From the very beginning, I became extremely excited about the project. . . . But that is their right. It is their organization. I can’t do anything about it.”

The orchestra has been auditioning guest conductors to replace Clark, who was forced out in February, 1988, after a bitter dispute with the board of directors over artistic direction and control of the orchestra he founded in 1979.

Besides the pay issue, Foster said: “There was some distrust about my commitment to building the orchestra, that I am regarded as a European person and would not be sufficiently committed here.”

Foster lives in Monte Carlo, where he is in his last season as music director of the Orchestra Philharmonique de Monte Carlo. He said that while he will continue to keep his primary residence in Monte Carlo, he would be more than willing to commit himself to Orange County.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Foster led the Pacific in September at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Last month, he conducted Mozart’s “Le nozze di Figaro” for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

He said he plans to become music director of the Jerusalem Symphony in 1991; he is now music adviser to that orchestra. He said he did not expect that job to take him out of the running for the Pacific Symphony post.

Spisto said that conducting the Pacific is not a full-time job and that it is not uncommon for a music director to hold that position with more than one orchestra.