Béla Bartók wrote the six volumes of Mikrokosmos with an educational purpose, winning students over to his innovations in technique and style and guiding them by steps to the highest artistic level. Folk-music keys and scales, polyphony, colour and articulation are integrated into music infused with Bartók’s uniquely characterful rhythms and deeply expressive lyricism. The Ten Easy Pieces are also educational, transforming folk songs into strongly evocative portraits of country life. Rooted in Bartók’s musical and social landscape and long renowned as an educator and flag-bearer of Hungarian culture, Lajos Kertész’s pianistic style and sonority has been likened to that of Bartók himself, making the significance of these recordings inestimable.