Alexander Dunn is bringing some unusual guitar music to town.

Edmonton Classical Guitar Society's season-ending performer, Dunn will feature music by Johann Mertz and Giulio Regondi, 19th-century Europeans whose works are being rediscovered.

The recital is tonight at Alberta College's Muttart Hall.

Dunn has taught at the University of Victoria for some 10 years. He's originally from San Diego but now is "proudly Canadian," he said, on the phone from home. He has toured internationally, playing solo recitals, new works with orchestra, duos with Pepe Romero - the works.

"I focused on the guitar fairly late, when I was 16," he recalled. "I'd done a lot of painting and sculpture, and played guitar and piano - but there were so many pianists. and I liked the colours of the classical guitar."

He earned two degrees from San Francisco Conservatory, plus a PhD in musicology from San Diego, and has taught widely.

Mertz became a major guitar composer in Vienna in the 1840s, concerned with writing serious music for his instrument. Dunn will perform his challenging Elegy. Dunn has also arranged Igor Stravinsky's Elegy for solo viola, and will play it in honour of the great blind Spanish composer Joquin Rodrigo, who died last year. Two major works of Rodrigo's will close the recital's first half.

Dunn's current project is working with early Beethoven and early 19th-century instruments. He has transcribed Beethoven works for mandolin, playing them on a 19th-century guitar, accompanied by an authentic fortepiano.

Giulio Regondi wrote extremely virtuoistic music, partly inspired by great Romantic pianists such as Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann. His 10 Etudes, of which Dunn will play five, only recently came to light in Moscow, and Dunn says they "constitute the most significant work for guitar written in the mid-19th century."

Add to this other big pieces by Rodrigo and Regondo, and Dunn says, "actually this whole program is pretty challenging. I just hope I get through it."