Nightride and Sunrise

Nightride and Sunrise (in Finnish: Öinen ratsastus ja auringonnousu; in German: Nächtlicher Ritt und Sonnenaufgang), Op. 55, is a single-movement tone poem for orchestra written in 1908 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.

Orchestration
Sibelius scored the work for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns (doubled if possible in the Sunrise), 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, tambourine, triangle and strings.

Background
Sibelius gave different accounts of the inspiration for this music. One, told to Karl Ekman, was that it was inspired by his first visit to the Colosseum in Rome, in 1901. Another account, given in his later years to his secretary Santeri Levas, was that the inspiration was a sleigh ride from Helsinki to Kerava "at some time around the turn of the century", during which he saw a striking sunrise.

Sibelius completed the score by November 1908 and sent the manuscript to Alexander Siloti, who conducted the first performance, in Saint Petersburg, in 1909. The reviews of the first performance were unfavorable, except for one in Novy Russ, and one reviewer called Siloti's conducting "slack and monotonous". A writer for Novoye Vremya asked, "Who is actually riding, and why?" Siloti had made cuts to the score.

The work represents a subjective, spiritual experience of nature by "an ordinary man." It unfolds in three contrasting parts: a galloping section whose length and dogged determination produce one of Sibelius's strangest utterances; a brief hymnic transition in the strings; and an exquisite Northern sunrise whose first rays emerge in the horns.

A typical performance takes about fourteen minutes.

Discography
The British conductor Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra made the world premiere studio recording of Nightride and Sunrise in 1936 for His Masters Voice (released in 2015 by Warner Classics). The sortable table below contains this and other commercially available recordings:

Notes, references, and sources

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