In Mexico I am known, if at all, as the composer of a piano piece I wrote in my final year at Cambridge. This has happened only because the Mexican choreographer Gloria Contreras (1934–) turned it into a ballet in 1959 and has kept it in the repertoire of her dance companies ever since. I wrote my Piano Variations in 1957 and when I was a graduate student at the Juilliard School in New York I lent a tape of it to Gloria Contreras who was interested in choreographing something of mine. At that time she was working for Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, where I spent some months on the staff the following year, but she also had a student group of her own. When I next saw her, three days after lending her the tapes, she said she had been up three days and nights and had choreographed the whole thing. Although abstract, the ballet is called Vitalitas, and I have renamed the piano work Vitalitas Variations. Every season since then, Vitalitas has been danced in Mexico City and my visit in 1986, supported by the British Council, was an invitation to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary. Gloria Contreras is an outstanding choreographer whose work ought to be better known internationally. She ran the Taller Coreografico at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México for many years and during my visit I saw three performances of Vitalitas. I also played the work myself in the three recitals I gave in different parts of Mexico City. For the theme of these programmes I chose British piano music showing the influence of Latin-American or African American idioms. I began with two pieces called Bliss and The Rout Trot, syncopated dances from the 1920s by Arthur Bliss; then came my own transformations of Edward MacDowell's popular ‘To a Wild Rose’, first as a blues called Blue Rose, then as a rag called Wild Rose Rag;1 then I finished the first half with the outstanding ragtime/jazz/blues piano sonata by Constant Lambert (1929). After the Vitalitas Variations in the second half I played rags by Francis Shaw, John McCabe and Laurence Holloway, who kindly sent me one he had just written specially.