A Little Haydn Festival--and Strudel Too : Music: A half-dozen works by the Austrian master are not all that’s on the menu with the Angeles String Quartet.

It’s billed as Ein Kleines Haydn Fest (A Little Haydn Festival).

According to the official timeline for Sunday’s event at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, however, only two hours are devoted to actual music-making. Which, morning strudel and picnic lunch aside, makes it roughly equal to any other concert, and at best might qualify it as “Ein Sehr Kleines Haydn Fest” (A Very Little Haydn Festival).

But that’s only on paper.

“It’s not so little,” said Steven Miller, 30, second violinist for the day’s featured group, the Angeles String Quartet. “We’re playing six Haydn quartets. . . . We normally do three on a program, so we’re thinking of this day as two concerts. It’s more than a little unusual.”

Very unusual, if you believe background materials describing the event as “the nation’s only festival devoted to the works of Haydn.”

Said Miller, speaking by phone from his part-time residence in San Francisco: “I would actually be surprised if that’s true. I heard once of a group that played all the Hadyn quartets nonstop over the course of three days.”

That’s one nonstop that probably wouldn’t fly in these parts. (Haydn composed more than 80 string quartets.) Center officials are hoping that Sunday’s actual schedule will.

On the program:

* 10 a.m.: Viennese coffee and strudel, and a preconcert talk by classical music writer Herbert Glass.

* 11 a.m.: Quartets in A, Opus 2, No. 1; in C, Opus 33, No. 3, “The Bird”; and, after a short intermission, in B Flat, Opus 64, No. 3.

* Noon: Picnic on the green.

* 2 p.m.: Quartets in D, Opus 1, No. 3; in A, Opus 20, No. 6, “Sun”; and, after a short intermission, in C, Opus 74, No. 1.

The strudel and the music will be served up in Founders Hall. The picnic--bring your own lunch--takes place across the street in the park adjoining South Coast Repertory.

The audience can mingle there with the artists: first violinist Kathleen Lenski, Miller, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody. Each ticket holder will go home with a Haydn Fest T-shirt.

Morning and afternoon concerts proceed chronologically within Haydn’s oeuvre.

“One of the things we’ve discovered is that by playing an early quartet, then a middle, that when you get to end of Haydn’s life, the quartets really sound like modern music in some ways,” Miller said.

“We’ve been able in the past to get the audience into the frame of mind of hearing these quartets for first time. Haydn was dealing with a brand-new art form. He invented the quartet, and each new development resulted from something he wrote. He was the ground-breaker.”

Haydn’s quartets are still breaking ground today. A German antiquarian book dealer paid a record $1.04 million at an auction two weeks ago at Sotheby’s in London for the working draft of four of his six Opus 50 quartets.

That draft, originally published in 1787, had been presumed lost until 1982, when an Australian woman who had been keeping it under her bed showed it to officials at a Haydn festival, then put it away in a bank vault. The most ever paid before for a Haydn manuscript had been $219,800 for six pages of a quartet he was working on when he died.

Miller had not heard the part about the Australian bed, but where performers are concerned, he figured the news about the draft’s existence is a yawner.

“There are a number of different sources for all the Haydn quartets,” Miller explained. “These sources range from autograph copies such as those found under the bed, to first editions, to correspondence with publishers including proofs. . . . It’s no surprise that different published editions vary.

“Being a performer means to be a musicologist also,” he said. “We look at as many different sources as possible, then come up with our own [performing] version. One person might think that’s a slur in the manuscript, another might say the slur is just a gravy stain. These are the kinds of things that academics debate hotly.

“Performers are interested in this sort of thing . . . but given three or four sources, you can back up any number of decisions. In the end, we do our own thing.”

Anyway, Miller pointed out that the recently auctioned manuscript may not or may not be available for musicians to scrutinize.

“It could remain in a vault forever,” he said. “But to me as a performer, that’s not so horrible. What’s horrible to me is when a rich businessman buys a Stradivarius and locks that up.”

* Ein Kleines Haydn Fest, with the Angeles String Quartet, begins at 10 a.m. in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $25. (714) 556-2787.