Although The Hamar Concert comes less than a year after The Trondheim Concert, there is a four year gap between them. In the interim, Berg had become more conscious of refining the story-telling element of his freely improvised episodes, something more easily said than done, but across eight performances – the shortest 5'35" and the longest 9'04" – there seems to be a sharper linear definition to his playing. On the Trondheim Concert he used contrast, and to a lesser extent disjunction, as a way of making a passage stand out in inverted commas, elements that helped give shape to his aural narrative and on Hamar such ends are used sparingly in the overall arc of his performance.

In the context of the spontaneously conceived, freely improvised solo piano recital, Berg gives evidence of artistic growth as he moves ever closer to achieving the kind of mastery in the idiom that many aspire to, but few achieve. Where this fascinating odyssey ends up will be interesting to see.

But what happens when you attempt to introduce an element of formality to spontaneity? This seems to be what a guiding principle behind Water Fabric, a large-scale piece for piano, drums, trumpet and string trio which integrates spontaneous improvisation into episodes of the written. A high-risk, high- reward endeavour, it relies on five musicians being at one with Berg’s overall conceptual integrity since written elements and motifs announce key and mood from which the leader's improvisation flows and which, on cue, he re-enters and allows others to take over the improvisational flow.

With programmatic titles like ‘Sun Glacier,’ ‘Acres of Dew,’ ’Duelling Rivers’ and others of ambiguous meaning, such as ’1914,’ ‘Triple Point Suite’ and ‘Hydrophobic,’ this is ambitious stuff, well executed, and whose challenge, integrating the improvisational gifts of each instrumentalist into a coherent overall arc along with the piano, is perhaps more absorbing in this instance in concert than on a recording.

Where the listener in the concert hall accepts episodes of what might be described as virtuous boredom, such moments seem to falter on replay. Attention spans are short away from the concert hall, and the temptation to fast-forward is suggestive of necessary refinement.