Öinen ratsastus ja auringonnousu is the original Finnish title for the work known as Night-Ride and Sunrise, the Op. 55 orchestral tone poem composed by Jean Sibelius in 1908. As the music itself (a depiction of a wild nocturnal ride through a haunted forest, with an ensuing cathartic sunrise as a new day dawns) seems to suggest in its huge range of contrasts and emotions, it belonged to a period of changing fortunes for the composer. As his diaries of the time show, often painfully, his moods alternated between buoyant confidence and bleak despair. He was plagued by debts and his health deteriorated; he was much possessed by intimations of death, and his music became darker and the more introspective. Nor were his professional affairs much better. Self-doubt and anxiety over his ability to create the large-scale works commissioned by his publisher Lienau made it difficult increasingly difficult to fulfill the conditions of his contract. After completing his Third Symphony, Sibelius wrote only two other works for Lienau, neither of which was well received by the public.

The first of these was the proto-minimalist tone poem Night-Ride and Sunrise. It may be described as "proto-minimalist" because, although a large orchestra is employed, Sibelius created its mystical and often unearthly effects by deploying instruments in very small groups, or against the sparest of accompaniments. The work, while having obvious folkloristic connections, was nonetheless not inspired by the ancient bardic legends of Finland's Kalevala, as were many of Sibelius' descriptive orchestral works. Structurally, too, Night-Ride and Sunrise ventured decisively away from the conventions of the sonata-form tone poem. Its sparse thematic groups are often heard to recur in a series of multiple cumulative rotations, though the full resources of the orchestra are kept in check until, as the sun greets the new day, a great paean of sound erupts, so that the ending has the effect of suspending the animation of what has gone before, rather as does the conclusion of Sibelius' Seventh Symphony.

Many commentators have drawn attention to the fact that here, Sibelius powerfully anticipates the spare, lean textures and quasi-minimalist language of his later works, and like his somber String Quartet in D minor, subtitled "Voces intimae" (1909), this piece also prefigures the Fourth Symphony's dark, brooding language to often chilling effect, as if the composer was somehow writing music which spoke of entrenched isolation, only to turn back to conscious thought at the very close. Night-Ride and Sunrise was premiered in St. Petersburg under Alexandre Siloti on January 21, 1909.

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