A pianist off-roads a Steinway into Griffith Park for an outdoor concert

A grand piano, hauled in on a Ford F-350, will make its way next weekend to Griffith Park.

Then, right below the Hollywood sign, the flatbed will unfold into a stage for a recital by pianist Hunter Noack, who has played everywhere from Yosemite Valley to Joshua Tree National Park.

His Sept. 26 and 27 performances are all part of In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild, organized in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. (The show is sold out, but you can sign up for the waitlist.)

For a decade, Noack has hauled his Steinway — the same model used at Carnegie Hall — through rough terrain to perform in unusual places: 370 concerts and counting.

The piano has survived fire, wind and 112-degree heat

"We've had the piano lid be ripped off by the wind. We've had the piano trailer tires catch fire on Highway 1. We've almost driven off the side of Mount Bachelor. We've played in 112-degree heat and negative 2 degrees in the winter," Noack said. And the piano has come out unscathed, including after it was towed down the washboard gravel along Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho — the only thing that happened was that it went out of tune.

How the show actually works

Among the pieces on the program at Griffith Park is "Nature Boy," the song Eden Ahbez wrote while living outdoors under the first L of the Hollywood sign. The song was later made famous by Nat King Cole.

Audiences at the Griffith Park show will be provided with wireless headphones for concert-hall quality sound, he said. "Some people just set up their picnic chairs or blankets right near the stage. Other people lay down," Noack said. "When there's so much else that's happening visually ... the music kind of automatically becomes a soundtrack, and we all get to experience that together."

The philosophy behind the series' name

The series is named after "In a Landscape," a piece by John Cage, who believed any sound could be music — even "somebody crinkling on a bag of chips," Noack said.

During his first show in 2016 at the Columbia River Gorge, Noack was midway through a soft Schumann piece about a delicate flower when 40 Harley-Davidsons on a memorial ride rolled up and circled the piano.

Rather than pack it in, he answered with Frederic Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," a piece built to mimic the aggressive clatter of a cotton mill. "It was a conversation between the piano and these roaring Harleys," he said.