MUSIC : Founder Gears Up for Corona del Mar’s 10th Baroque Festival : The annual event’s budget is increased to $30,000 for its 10th year. It will begin Sunday with an organ concerto.

In honor of its 10th anniversary year, the Corona del Mar Baroque Festival will feature . . . business as usual.

“There is no particular theme to the festival this year,” founding music director Burton Karson said in a phone interview last week. “Each concert is very different. I tried to do special things in all four concerts, as we always do.

“But this being our 10th year, we’re spending half again as much on the budget as we did last year. It’s expensive.”

Karson estimated that the budget, most of which goes to the musicians, will be about $30,000.

“We’re paying the musicians a little more and using more musicians,” he said. “It’s a very rich season.”

The first program--Sunday at St. Michael and All Angels Church--will include an organ concerto by the mysterious Mr. Edwards of the 1760s, “whoever he or she is,” Karson said.

“There is no entry in the standard literature about anyone at that time named Edwards,” he said. “There was a Mrs. Edwards. Maybe to publish, she could not use her first name.”

All that is known, he said, is that someone named Edwards published a set of six organ concertos in London about 1760.

“We don’t have an exact date,” he said. “They’re Handelian, as almost anyone’s would be at the time. They’re very good, interesting and well crafted, and jolly pieces.”

But to perform the music, which Karson had found in handwritten parts in various libraries, he had to feed the parts into a computer so he could print out a full conducting score.

“Modern technology makes it possible to conduct an 18th-Century organ concerto,” Karson said with a laugh.

Also on the opening concert will be an organ concerto by Ottorino Respighi, which has prompted some questioning of Karson’s programming priorities: What’s a 20th-Century composer doing on a Baroque music festival?

“We try to keep it Baroque,” Karson said. “If we get out of the Baroque borders, it’s not on the soft edges. It’s completely out of the Baroque--either contemporary or Romantic. We’ve done Brahms and are doing some Schumann on the first concert.”

The chief qualification, he said, is having “either stylistic or formal inspiration from the Baroque.”

“But we don’t do that to the point of meaninglessness,” he said. “Last year we did a Brahms motet. Brahms was enamored of Bach. He was one of the original subscribers of the (collected works). He studied counterpoint all his life, and the last works he wrote were chorale preludes.

“For every piece that we have done, there has been an explanation in the program notes, how specifically or why specifically we’ve done it. Here, we’re doing two movements of Respighi’s concerto. He’s clearly a 20th-Century, post-Romantic, post-Impressionist composer. But this work has definite Baroque elements.”

The concerts next Wednesday and Friday will be at the Sherman Library and Gardens. Chamber works by Arcangelo Corelli, Jean-Marie Leclair the Elder and Handel, among others, are on the Wednesday bill. Friday will be devoted to Handel’s “Acis and Galatea,” with soprano Jennifer Smith, tenor Gregory Wait and baritone Christopher Lindbloom.

The final concert--June 10 at the church--will be a Bach program, including the “Easter Oratorio”; the a cappella motet, “Ich lasse dich nicht”, and a curious unfinished work identified by Karson as the Violin Concerto Movement in D, BWV 1045.

“It’s really a sinfonia to an unfinished or lost cantata,” Karson said. “It’s very brilliant. The soloist plays lots of triple and double stops chords, then goes absolutely mad technically. It’s accompanied by a full-string (ensemble) and continuo, three trumpets and timpani. It’s madness. Nobody does that.”

The 10th annual Corona del Mar Baroque Festival begins Sunday at St. Michael and All Angels Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive, Corona del Mar. The festival will continue Wednesday and Friday at the Sherman Library and Gardens, 2645 E. Coast Highway; the final program will take place June 10 at the church. All performances begin at 8 p.m. Tickets: $15. Information: (714) 549-7175.