New York, NY (Top40 Charts) The Guardian has published a number of lists of the Best Culture of the 21st Century (So Far). Several Nonesuch artists and recordings have made the lists, including works by Rokia Traoré, John Adams, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, and more. Also on the lists are films for which Nonesuch released soundtracks by Jonny Greenwood, Clint Mansell, and more.
Rokia Traoré's 2009 album Tchamantché has made the list of the 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century. The album combines electric guitar with traditional instrumentation on nine self-penned tunes plus the Gershwin classic "The Man I Love." The original Guardian review gave five stars to this "intriguing, sophisticated and often intimate set that is quite unlike any of the other great music Mali has produced." Also on the list are Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté collaboration In the
Heart of the Moon, first released on World Circuit and Nonesuch, and Fleet Foxes's self-titled debut album, which Nonesuch reissued in
Europe in the 2018 special edition First Collection 2006-2009.
On the Guardian's list of the Best Classical
Music Works of the 21st Century are three works recorded by Nonesuch. John Adams's 2009 piece City Noir, of which Nonesuch released a Grammy Award-winning recording with the St. Louis Symphony led by
David Robertson, featuring saxophonist Timothy McAllister, in 2014, is on the list at No. 24. The Guardian's Andrew Clements calls it a "celebration of orchestral virtuosity."
Steve Reich's 2010 piece WTC 9/11 is on the Guardian's Best Classical list at No. 17. Reich's reflection on the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, WTC 9/11 is scored for three string quartets, all performed on the 2011 Nonesuch premeire recording by Kronos Quartet, and pre-recorded voices, including NORAD air traffic controllers, first responders, and women who kept vigil over the dead. (Reich's music is also a part of the Guardian's list of the Best Dance of the 21st Century via Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, for whom the composer "has been a longtime muse," in her setting of his seminal work
Music for 18 Musicians in her 2001 piece Rain, "a hugely sophisticated work that bathes the audience in a dreamlike glow." She brings her 1982 work Fase, Four Movements to the
Music of Steve Reich, to New York Live Arts next week.)
Louis Andriessen's Grawemeyer Award-winning film opera La Commedia (2009), a collaboration with director Hal Hartley, is on the list at No. 7. The piece is based on Dante's
Divine Comedy, with additional texts including the Old Testament's "Song of Songs." Nonesuch released a two-CD-plus-DVD set of the Dutch
National Opera production featuring the Asko | Schönberg Ensembles, led by Reinbert de Leeuw, in 2014. "Andriessen's wonderfully polyglot score, with its host of historical references and exuberant embrace of jazz and folk music, stands on its own," writes Clements in the Guardian.
Also on the Best Classical list is Caroline Shaw's 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Partita, which "has to be the most joyous work on this list," writes the Guardian's Erica Jeal. Shaw's new album, Orange, on which Attacca Quartet performs six of her pieces for string quartet, was released earlier this year on New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records.
Three films for which Nonesuch released the soundtrack albums have made the Guardian's list of the Best Films of the 21st Century. Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem for a Dream, for which Nonesuch released Clint Mansell's score performed by Kronos Quartet and later its first vinyl edition, has made the list, as has Richard Linklater's 2014 film Boyhood, which is on the list at No. 3. Paul
Thomas Anderson's 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, about which Variety has said "Jonny Greenwood's musical compositions almost become another character in the film," has topped the Guardian's list as the No. 1 film of the century.
