Night Ride and Sunrise, Op. 55

Program notes

About the Work

Night Ride and Sunrise is among the less often played of Sibelius’s tone poems, and among the oddest. He completed it in November 1908. It was the first orchestral score he finished after a series of painful operations that year to remove a tumour from his throat, and the experience has been linked with the sparer, more inward manner of the works that followed, the string quartet Voces intimae and the Fourth Symphony.

Sibelius sent the manuscript to the Russian pianist and conductor Alexander Siloti, who gave the first performance in St Petersburg on 23 January 1909. It went badly. Siloti later admitted that he had made cuts in the score, and the reviews were poor.

Where the piece came from Sibelius explained differently at different times. In one account the first idea came to him in Rome in the spring of 1901, on seeing the Colosseum. In another, told late in life to his secretary Santeri Levas, it was the memory of a journey by horse-drawn sleigh between Helsinki and Kerava around the turn of the century, during which he watched a spectacular sunrise. The two stories do not exclude each other, and neither turns the work into a travelogue. What the title promises is what happens: a long ride through darkness, and then daylight.

The music is as plain as the title. For about half its length it does almost nothing but ride, on a single obsessive rhythm, in a way that has reminded later listeners of minimalism. Then it stops riding, and one of the most beautiful dawns in orchestral music takes its place. The piece is not built like a symphonic movement, with themes in conflict, but as two contrasted states joined by a transition.

Kirill Petrenko places it at the head of a programme of landscapes: a Norwegian concerto and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” follow. The orchestra takes the same programme to the Nordic countries immediately afterwards, beginning with its Europakonzert on 1 May in Turku, in Sibelius’s Finland.

What to Listen For

The ride. After a few violent opening bars the strings settle into a galloping long-short rhythm, quiet and relentless, that runs for minutes on end. The harmony shifts beneath it, the volume swells and drops, and little else changes. Eventually the woodwind add a plaintive, drooping melody over the hoofbeats.

The transition. The rhythm at last gives out. The strings alone take up the woodwind’s melody and turn it into something like a hymn, broad and eloquent. This is the hinge of the piece.

Sunrise. The first light comes in the horns, with soft chords that swell and overlap. Woodwind figures stir above them, the brass harmonies widen step by step, and the work ends not in a blaze but in a calm, full glow, fading on a quiet chord.