Rosenstrasse

Caldera Records is proud to present Loek Dikker's score for the motion picture Rosenstrasse directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Katja Riemann and Maria Schrader.

The film tells an extraordinary story about the defiance of women: In the centre stands Ruth, a Jewish mother living in New York. Her daughter Hannah one day finds out that her mother was sent to the United States by her aunt during the Second World War. The true story unfolds in front of Hannah's eyes as she decides to track down Lena. Ruth's mother had been captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a factory building in Rosenstrasse. Ruth and Lena were connected by their fate: Although Lena was German and member of the aristocracy, her husband Fabian was Jewish and kept prisoner in the same building as Ruth's mother. Desperate to see their Jewish men freed, a group of women assembled in front of the factory building in Rosenstrasse for a growing protest in the course of which they put their own lives on the line. For the German-Dutch co-production, director Margarethe von Trotta relied on Loek Dikker to provide the music, the Netherlands' most renowned composer for film and television who had celebrated international successes with Paul Verhoeven's film The Fourth Man and Eric Red's Body Parts (released on CD by Varèse Sarabande in the US). Rosenstrasse is the work in film he is most proud of – and for good reason. His orchestral composition is complex and rich – searing yet unsentimental. It is primarily his achievement that Rosenstrasse is not a manipulative tearjerker for his music strikes just the right balance between drawing out the emotions, expressing the horror of war, and underlining the initial feeling of powerlessness in an oppressive system by giving room to silence.

The 51st CD-release of Caldera Records features a detailed booklet text by Stephan Eicke and elegant artwork by Luis Miguel Rojas. The CD was mastered by Richard Moore and produced by Stephan Eicke, Loek Dikker and John Elborg.