E-Mail This Article to a Friend The newest in new Adventures in ‘contemporary’ music, plus Ben Heppner BY DAVID WEININGER

What do we talk about when we talk about new music? Strictly speaking, we’d be talking about music composed in the present or the very recent past — works where the ink is newly dry or the save button has just been pressed. But the truth is that we encounter the new in any unfamiliar piece that opens up musical horizons in our minds and souls. What’s contemporary is always new, but newness is also in the ear of the beholder, and that impression is part of four recent releases of 20th-century music to cross my desk.

György Ligeti, now 81 years young, has one of those musical minds so fresh and inventive that almost every composition teems with the unexpected. The fifth entry in Teldec’s "Ligeti Project" gathers oddball pieces from the years 1948-1965 that mirror what the composer calls "the bizarre and hazardous course of my life." Included are arrangements of old Hungarian dances for chamber ensemble, a fragment for solo trumpet, an early electronic piece, and selections from the piano collection Musica Ricercata arranged for accordion. None sounds quite like the master avant-gardist we know today, but each has touches and details where you can detect that developing sophistication and voice. Of larger significance is the paired set of Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures. These settings of nonsense texts for three singers and chamber ensembles are among Ligeti’s most delightfully wacky items. Instruments and voices howl and bark their way through controlled chaos, and the whole thing seems like the soundtrack to some maniacally strange puppet show. An essential addition to the Ligeti canon.

Valentin Silvestrov’s music runs a full 180 degrees in opposition. ECM recently began to document this Ukrainian composer’s consistently original vision. Earlier this year, it released Silvestrov’s Requiem for Larissa, a harrowing memorial for his wife. Now comes Silent Songs, a collection of 25 simple, tonal songs setting Russian and English poems. Think of it as an Eastern Winterreise. The title is uncannily accurate, for this is some of the quietest music imaginable. The singer is instructed to sing sotto voce throughout, giving the cycle the character of half-recalled memories and echoes of events now confined to a desolate past, and this makes the few loud outbursts even more unsettling. The cycle is, as you’d expect, a huge challenge to perform; baritone Sergey Yakovenko and pianist Ilya Scheps render it with amazing power.

The crack new-music ensemble eighth blackbird, on the other hand, just want to have fun, and they do so in spades on beginnings (Cedille), where they juxtapose two works that meditate on the world’s creation: George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), a 30-year-old classic, and Divinium Mysterium, by the 28-year-old Daniel Kellogg. Any thought that Kellogg might suffer by comparison goes out the window, for his composition brims with joy and invention. His influences are open to view — chant, spiky Stravinskian rhythms, rapture à la Messiaen, and broad modal shifts from the minimalists — but the voice binding them together is all his own. Divinium Mysterium culminates in a dance of ecstatic power that creates an oddly appropriate bridge to Crumb’s more hermetic reflections on eternity. If all contemporary music got the dedicated performances that eighth blackbird offer, we’d probably be hearing a lot more of it.

Speaking of Messiaen: if Crumb’s 1971 work is a classic, then the French master’s 1945 Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus might seem like core repertory by now. But this massive cycle of piano pieces still astounds by virtue of the scale of its ambition and its harmonic freedom. RCA Red Seal has decided to reissue Peter Serkin’s excellent 1973 recording, one of the first to show how magnificent this music is. And though we’re now awash in great recordings of Vingt regards, Serkin’s effort is notable for the sure-handed architectural control and poetic vision he brings to it. If a 50-year-old piece can sound new, why not an old recording as well?

OUT OF THE COLD? Ben Heppner ran into vocal trouble the last time he was in town: he was reported to be under the weather, and you could hear him struggling during the BSO’s two performances of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, especially on Saturday. We’re hoping he’s back to full steam by next Friday, when, presented by the Bank of America Celebrity Series, he’ll bring an inventive program of songs by Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Tosti to Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. That’s on November 19 at 8 p.m., and tickets are $41 to $61; call (617) 482-6661.