This Classical Pianist Has Reached the Mountaintop. No, Really.

For the last decade, the classical pianist Hunter Noack has been embarking on an unusual journey: He hauls a thousand-pound 1912 Steinway concert grand piano to places in the outdoors not known for hosting concerts.

Picture a man seated at a piano beside a lake. It could also be on a mountaintop, in a forest or meadow.

This summer, Noack, 36, is in the midst of a 10th-anniversary tour of his “In A Landscape” project, which has taken him to Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen, Calif.; Black Butte Ranch in Sisters, Ore.; and Warm Springs Preserve in Ketchum, Idaho.

“I get excited at the idea of bringing a piano where no piano has gone before,” Noack said.

Inspired by the preservationist John Muir, Noack started the project as a way of getting closer to nature, and bringing classical music to rural areas where it is not typically accessible. The idea, Noack said, is to remove the barriers that typically limit classical music to concert venues like Carnegie Hall.

“What John Muir was trying to articulate is that we don’t just need the wild to recreate in,” Noack said in an interview. “We need the wild to be human, and to be more compassionate, and to be more empathetic. And that’s the medicine that I needed. To be outside.”

The roots of the project can be traced back to 2015. Noack, a native of Sunriver, Ore., had just moved to Portland, a couple of years after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music in London. He was working odd jobs and struggling with student debt. He considered joining the National Guard, but instead applied for a small grant from a regional arts and culture council in Portland to try an experiment.

Noack had long been fascinated by immersive theater. As a student at the University of Southern California, Noack said he had been “enamored” with classmates who independently produced their own shows, which included plays by Anton Chekhov staged in abandoned warehouses, and a Sam Shepard piece performed in a rundown hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

“I wanted more of this in my life,” Noack said. He found the shows “scrappy and fun and daring.”

After graduating from college, Noack, along with a friend from boarding school, created an immersive play in San Francisco. In London, Noack eagerly took in shows by the experimental theater company Punchdrunk.

“These theater and opera companies were really pushing the boundaries, and that’s what I wanted to do with my art: classical piano,” Noack said.

A traveling group of six helps Noack bring his piano to the various remote locations. The team has developed a system for moving the nine-foot instrument. The piano sits on a custom-designed 16-foot flatbed trailer, and can go anywhere that a four-wheel-drive vehicle can. Once they have arrived at a destination, the trailer turns into the stage.

The first year, Noack rented a piano from a local dealer. But when he said he wanted to bring the rented piano to Mount Bachelor, in Bend, Ore., and the Alvord Desert, in the southeastern part of the state, the dealer did not want to take on the insurance liability.

Afterward, in 2017, a philanthropist purchased and donated the piano that Noack uses today.

Noack didn’t intend for “In A Landscape” to be a full-time job, but the initial audience response was so large that he kept going. The original run of the tour had nine dates, but it has since expanded to more than 50 dates a year, over a wider area.

The concerts are held rain or shine, hot or cold. (The temperature during concerts has ranged from subfreezing to above 100 degrees.)

Among the notable locales where Noack has played are the entrance to Yellowstone (via the Roosevelt Arch in Montana), Joshua Tree National Park in California, Crater Lake in southern Oregon and Banff National Park in Canada. Most of the venues are in national parks in the Pacific Northwest, but Noack said that the most meaningful concerts haven’t necessarily been at the most recognizable locations, but rather at smaller, more intimate spots like ranches and farms.

“It’s really all about the people that are there and the relationship that they have with that space and what the landscape is doing for us in that for those 90 minutes,” Noack said.

Noack’s shows have even appeared to attract wildlife. He recalled that at a two-night run near the Oregon coast, the piano was located near a cliff. A whale swam up to shore for both performances and lingered for their entirety.

“I like to think that the whale was enjoying this show,” Noack said.

Among other wildlife that made appearances were free-range horses, birds and deer.

Noack’s ambition to bring a piano to unfamiliar territory is expansive.

He said he wants to perform at, among other striking sites, remote villages in Canada; at the Preikestolen, a steep cliff in Norway; during a safari in Africa; atop Vinicunca, the rainbow mountain in the Andes of Peru; and by the salt flats of Bolivia.

“My hope is that I can use this project, my love of the music and my curiosity about how public lands and natural resources are managed, to explore the world and learn,” Noack said.