It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot More Like Baroque : Festival: After 14 years without, the event will employ period instruments for two of its four concerts.

The Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival, which some would say should have been among the first to do so, is finally embracing period instruments.

Sort of.

Only half of the four concerts, the opening and closing orchestral events that festival director Burton Karson conducts at St. Michael & All Angels Church, will use older-style instruments. The two middle concerts, which will feature chamber performances, will be held at Sherman Library and Gardens.

The reason for only doing half the series with period instruments is simple. Karson said the artists he wanted for the middle chamber programs happen to employ modern instruments.

So why did even this tenuous foray into instrumental authenticity take 14 years?

“The honest answer is that now I can, that good instrumentalists are available,” Karson explained. “In earlier years when I had entertained the thought, the Baroque instrumentalists that I had heard were not (playing) in tune, not really very good. I don’t care how accurate they were in some ways, (the music they make) has to sound beautiful.”

This year, the schedule is as follows:

* Sunday: The weeklong festival opens with a program of concertos for flauto traverso (“wood, but not to be confused with a recorder,” said Karson); arch lute (“the big lute, with 25 strings, it has to be tuned a lot”); harpsichord, and other Baroque instruments.

* June 8: “Music in the Gardens” reprises the festival’s 1988 production of Adriano Banchieri’s “Barca di Venetia per Padova (Gondola from Venice to Padua),” 20 madrigals for five vocalists, cellist, harpsichordist and and narrator.

* June 10: Ensemble and unaccompanied sonatas will feature flutist Louise Di Tullio and violinist Clayton Haslop.

* June 12: The Festival Orchestra and Singers and vocal soloists conclude the series with Handel’s Dixit Dominus, Alessandro Scarlatti’s Concerto Grosso in F Major and Magnificat, and Bach’s cantata, Nun komm der Heiden Heiland.

The “period” instruments that will be heard are actually replicas made, according to Karson, “absolutely to the specifications” of 17th- and 18th-Century instruments.

“The antique instruments, the Stradivarius violins we hear today, were all altered in the 19th Century,” Karson noted. “The necks were made longer; steel strings were used, the bows were different.”

When music is played on period replicas, he said, “It’s not just that people will hear a gentler sound and lower pitch. Held notes have a different shape. Different accents come out. The feeling of flow in the music is different.”

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Violins and flauto traversos won’t be the only replicas at the festival: On stage during the Banchieri performance will be a replica gondola.

“It’s big enough so that when the singers sit behind it, it seems as if they’re in the boat,” Karson said. “It’s a charming excursion and a very humorous piece.” The performance will feature English narration, “with only a slight Italian accent,” by Massimo Navarretta, Italian-born owner of Amici restaurant in Costa Mesa.

According to Karson, the advantage of using period instruments, or replicas, is not only creating historically appropriate sound; the players are also more aware of stylistic subtleties.

“I’m trusting that I won’t have to describe to them how to play ornaments,” Karson said.

“When I draw on players who are absolutely splendid, but whose experience is almost completely with the modern orchestra, I have to describe the difference between a trill and mordent, (I have to explain) that in an appoggiatura the dissonant tone is more important and the resolution is softer, not louder. I really have to rehearse these things!”

And it’s really hard to imagine that absolutely splendid players aren’t taught those things in music school.

“They hear about it, in some cases,” Karson said. “But most of the time, they perform the music as the edition or the teacher tells them to. They memorize a piece by Bach, Handel or Telemann, then perform it. They don’t think stylistically.

“If at the very last minute you feel the need, with the period players you can say, ‘Wonderful, let’s do that’; you can say, ‘Let’s put a mordent there; it would be very good to echo that,’ and they’ll do it. Not a trill, a mordent. And they’ll actually do it!”

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According to Karson, using both types of instruments at the festival is not a case of historically informed fence-sitting.

“I don’t think it sends a mixed message, because we’re not actually mixing them,” Karson explained. “Different rooms, different repertoire, different players. . . . It will be an interesting experience for our subscribers, and I’m sure we’ll have a verbal vote. I’m going to be listening myself, not only to the music but to the comments of our patrons. And maybe even the critics.”

* The Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival takes place Sunday and June 12 at 4 p.m. at St. Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive, Corona del Mar. On June 8 and 10 at 8 p.m., the site shifts to Sherman Library and Gardens, 2645 East Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. Tickets, $20-$25; series of four concerts, $70. (714) 760-7887.