For book and classical music lovers who love getting outside in Central Oregon, it doesn’t get much better than this Sunday’s In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild concert at Fort Rock.

The 4 p.m. concert by pianist Hunter Noack will also feature a poem written by Ellen Waterston, Bend resident and recently appointed Poet Laureate of Oregon, in honor of Fort Rock.

Now a National Natural Landmark, Fort Rock, located southeast of Bend in Lake County, was once an island in an inland sea. Erosion from waters lapping at its towering walls, which resemble a fort if you squint right, may still be seen.

Noack has presented the classical music concerts, in which he performs on a 9-foot Steinway atop mountains, in meadows and beside towering old-growth trees for nine years, for which Waterston has written and read poems several times before.

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Bend’s Ellen Waterston named Oregon Poet Laureate

Waterston and Noack had already conferred on the Fort Rock concert prior to Waterston’s being honored with the post in August. Waterston is the state’s 11th poet laureate, succeeding slam poet Anis Mojgani, who was appointed in 2020.

Among her goals for the two-year appointment is to visit every portion of the state.

“My hope is to touch every county in that time in some way, shape or form,” she said last month.

“Ellie has a way of capturing the soul of a place with her poetry,” Noack said in a press release. “Our mutual passion is to connect the audience with the landscape and create new and transformative experiences.”

Tickets, $45 each, are available for the concert, which also includes admission to the Fort Rock Historical Museum, and a pie social and “Barn” Dance following the concert at the Fort Rock Grange. Visit inalandscape.org for more information.