 Holst had been distressed by hostile reviews of some of his earlier works, but he was indifferent to critical opinion of "Egdon Heath", which he regarded as, in Adams's phrase, his "most perfectly realized composition".Towards the end of his life Holst wrote the "Choral Fantasia" (1930) and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band; the resulting prelude and scherzo "Hammersmith" was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life.The composer and critic Colin Matthews considers the work "as uncompromising in its way as "Egdon Heath", discovering, in the words of Imogen Holst, 'in the middle of an over-crowded London ... the same tranquillity that he had found in the solitude of Egdon Heath'".