MUSIC REVIEWS : Same Place, Same Thing--but in a Good Way : The music-making goes right at the opening of the weeklong Baroque Festival of Corona del Mar, now in its 12th year.

Like its role model in the north--the Carmel Bach Festival--the weeklong Baroque Festival of Corona del Mar can be counted on to do things pretty much the same way at each outing.

That kind of consistency may make for predictability, but when the music-making goes right--as it did, mostly, at the opening of the 12th festival on Sunday--it is easy to admire the artistic direction.

Burton Karson, who founded this June series in 1981, continues to mastermind and conduct the five-concert series. For the first one, Sunday afternoon at St. Michael and All Angels Church at the top of a hill overlooking the coastal community, he again chose a program of instrumental concertos, in 1992 six, as opposed to the seven he essayed at last year’s opening.

It was still a generous agenda. Maybe not so much for the listener--who can be grateful for the chance to hear rare and familiar works juxtaposed cannily--but for the performers, who may not have had all the preparation time they might wish.

Scrappiness, then, as well as an assured and informed sense of Baroque style, characterized Karson’s reliably conducted performances, devoted to works attributed to, or actually by, Alessandro Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Alessandro Marcello, Vivaldi and Soler.

Wonderful tunes and a keen display of instrumental achievement are what make all these pieces worth keeping alive. Though the Festival Orchestra’s accompaniments heard Sunday sometimes faltered, the display, by six genuine virtuosos, never did.

Violinist Clayton Haslop, who is serving again as concertmaster of the ensemble, provided the most brilliance, in a musically pointed, technically effortless performance of “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

Oboist Donald Leake, one of the heroes of the 1991 series, brought expert stylishness, elegance of phrasing and relentless musical communicativeness to Marcello’s C-minor Concerto.

Flutist Louise di Tullio did the same, with gorgeous sounds a bonus, for a little known but perfectly charming Concerto in G attributed to Pergolesi.

Organist Samuel John Swartz was the resourceful protagonist in a C-minor work attributed to Scarlatti, and, at the end of the afternoon, in a pastiche concerto put together from pieces by Antonio Soler. Though the paste-up seemed viable, even admirably successful, frequent glitches in its performance caused one to suspect that insufficient time had gone into its actual preparation.

Besides Swartz, Di Tullio, Leake, Haslop and cellist Evan Drachman--who, earlier had given a sturdy reading of a Concerto in F by Vivaldi--the sixth soloist in the Soler melange was violinist Robin Olson.