Bartók’s Mikrokosmos is one of the milestones in the pedagogical piano repertoire ╩ and yet it is also far more than a ''classical'' piano primer. These 153 piano pieces, organised in ascending order of difficulty, engage not only with technical aspects of piano playing, but also with the fundamentals of composition ╩ from ''Ostinato'', ''Free variations'' and ''Imitation and inversion'' concerning compositional technique, to programmatic ideas as in ''From the diary of a fly'' or the famous ''S