Even once he became established as a leading composer, Vaughan Williams made plenty of time for small, humble projects, sometimes at the request of small performing groups lacking in prestige. His output includes numerous arrangements of folk songs, hymn tunes, and carols, as well as incidental music for plays by Euripides, Maeterlinck, and (especially) Shakespeare. While these smaller works lack the grandeur of his symphonies or choral music, they nonetheless capture the composer's distinctive serene, lush style. Indeed, two pieces inspired by similar considerations, the Fantasia on "Greensleeves" and the Five Variants of "Dives and Lazarus," remain among the composer's most popular works. The Two Hymn-Tune Preludes fall into this category as well. Scored for small orchestra and making only minor technical demands on the performers, this brief work finds beauty in simplicity. The settings make use of both twentieth-century and much older compositional techniques: the first movement contains some unorthodox harmonies and fairly free counterpoint, while the second movement features the violas adopting the ancient role of a cantus firmus.