On the broad green lawn in front of the old Cant family ranch house near Kimberly, part of the headquarters complex for the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, somebody has parked a flatbed trailer.

The sides of the trailer have been draped in black cloth, transforming it into an impromptu stage, and perched atop the flatbed is a regal-looking grand piano.

Framed by the whitewashed ranch house on one side and the towering strata of Sheep Rock on the other, surrounded by green trees and brown hills under a clear blue sky, the lone piano seems strangely out of place.

Then the opening notes of Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6” fill the air as pianist Hunter Noack begins to play.

And suddenly the piano doesn’t seem out of place at all.

The swirling notes from Noack’s Steinway, the fruit trees and cottonwoods of the old ranch bowing their heads and waving their limbs in the breeze, the songbirds darting after insects in the tall grass, the John Day River sliding past under the warm summer sun, the occasional pickup driving by on Highway 19 — all of it blends together in one great, harmonious whole.

The June 12 performance was part of an outdoor concert series called “In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild,” which Noack launched in 2016 with nine shows. This season’s itinerary numbers 50 dates, including Noack’s fifth visit to the Cant Ranch. The series has now racked up more than 260 performances, reaching more than 50,000 people across eight states, primarily in the West, and parts of Canada.

Underwritten by grants and donations, “In a Landscape” concerts are presented primarily in rural areas where local residents can attend for free or on a subsidized basis.

The locations, many of them on public lands, showcase some of North America’s most spectacular landscapes. A microphone in the piano transmits the music to wireless headphones, freeing audience members to walk around, explore the area and take in the views while Noack performs a classical repertoire rarely heard outside the concert hall.

More than 100 people traveled to the Cant Ranch for the June 12 show, bringing lawn chairs and blankets and picnic baskets. There were lots of little children and big dogs, all of them remarkably well-behaved.

When he wasn’t playing the piano, Noack interacted easily with the audience, mixing stories about the composer and history of each piece with personal anecdotes about his own background.

“The reason I play the piano is my mother was a pianist,” he said between movements of Beethoven’s “Sonata Pathetique.”

He was too shy to attend music class as a child, he explained, so his mother taught him herself.

“Now I have the great pleasure of working with my mother. For the last eight years she has been the executive director of ‘In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild,’ and this is one of her favorite pieces.”

Part of Noack’s aim in these concerts is to break down the barriers between classical music and modern audiences.

Introducing “4’33”,” by avant-garde composer John Cage (who also wrote “In a Landscape,” the piece from which the concert series takes its name), he asks the audience to take off their headphones for the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of the title and listen to the ambient sounds of the Cant Ranch — wind, birdsong, water flowing over gravel, the low buzz of human conversation.

“The idea was that when you put non-musical sounds in the concert hall and put all this attention and focus on it in a musical context, it becomes musical,” he said.

“I always felt a little claustrophobic and like I needed to fidget in the concert hall,” he added. “That’s one reason I like playing outside.”

During some pieces, Noack invites audience members to clamber up on the trailer with him and lie down on the stage or put their hands on the piano to feel the sound waves through their bodies.

And throughout the performance there are frequent invitations to just get up, walk around and admire the views.

“If you haven’t yet wandered, please do so for this piece,” he said before playing a movement from the Mozart concerto that was used in the soundtrack for the 1967 film “Elvira Madigan.”

“This is the andante portion of the piece, and andante means walking.”

At the conclusion of the 90-minute concert, Noack thanked some of the sponsors who make “In a Landscape” possible. He also expressed his gratitude to Adele Cerny, who was in the audience, for organizing his first performance at the John Day Fossil Beds in 2019.

“Adele is really the woman who brought us here that very first year,” he said.

Cerny, who lives in Bear Valley with her husband, Mark, recalled hearing a radio interview with Noack about his “In a Landscape” project and thinking it would be a perfect fit for Grant County.

“He talked about how he wanted to do concerts in beautiful places,” she said, “and I thought, ‘What’s more beautiful than the Cant Ranch and Sheep Rock?’”

Cerny tracked Noack down on Facebook and contacted him. Noack was intrigued but explained that he would need funding to add the ranch to his tour and permission from the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument to play there.

Cerny went to work on both fronts, getting approval from the monument’s superintendent and grants from the Grant County Chamber of Commerce and the Juniper Arts Council. Now the Cant Ranch is a regular stop on the “In a Landscape” itinerary.

Those return visits are something Noack cherishes.

“My favorite thing about doing these shows is probably getting to know the places and the people in the places,” he said.

“We don’t get to spend a lot of time in every place, but when you come back year after year, you can start to build friendships.”