While some orchestras offer musical sugarplums at holiday time, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is giving its public a clear choice this year. The 20th and final annual edition of "Welcome Yule!" focuses on popular Christmas fare while the weekend subscription concerts carry more serious musical intent.

Guest conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto is ending the orchestra's calendar year with a tour of 20th century music from the 1930s to the 1990s. The program, which spans four different cultures and as many different styles, is a model of intelligent planning and smart execution. It gives audience members plenty of music that is big, colorful and accessible but is in no way soporific.

Anchoring the concert heard Thursday night at Orchestra Hall was the orchestra's first downtown performance of a contemporary classic, James MacMillan's "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel" (1991-92).

The Scottish composer wrote his percussion concerto for soloist Evelyn Glennie, who has performed it on numerous occasions, including a CSO concert at Ravinia in 2002. Many other solo percussionists have since taken up its considerable challenges, making it one of the most popular pieces of its kind, with some 500 performances all around the world, at last count.

A devout Roman Catholic, MacMillan uses the eponymous Advent plainchant as the basis of a study of the theological implications of the period between Advent and Easter. The five continuous sections are in arch form, with the longest and slowest – an elaborate cadenza for marimba poised over meditative calm in the orchestra – in the middle. Fragments of the plainchant fade in and out before the tune emerges intact as a chorale in the second dance-section.

Most of "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel" summons extended sequences of hard-driving rhythmic activity from a huge palette of tuned and untuned percussion instruments overlaying a huge, busy orchestra. (The composer refers to the various pulse rates as "an ever-changing heartbeat.") It sometimes sounds as if the orchestra is trying to drown out the soloist, but just as often the reverse is achieved. There's a piquantly effective coda in which the orchestra members play jingling little bells while the soloist bangs on large tubular bells, sending echoes resounding throughout the hall.

This is a colorful, wildly exhilarating thrill-ride of a piece that played to the virtuosic strengths of CSO principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh as brilliantly as it did to Glennie's when she performed it at Ravinia. The fun of Thursday's performance was as much visual as aural, as the hyperactive Yeh tore from one set of instruments – vibraphone to the left of the podium; drums, cymbals and woodblocks in the middle; marimba and bells to the right – to the other. She was wonderfully incisive and drew an extended ovation once the dust had cleared.

Prieto, the Mexican-born music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and the Louisiana Philharmonic, is a valuable musician to have at the helm for pieces such as this, where keeping a level head is essential, especially when the activity level is at its most manic. His beat was clear, his attention to detail alert, his cuing efficient, his manner cool and focused. He gave the players the help they needed without getting in their way.

All this resulted in fine readings of two durable showpieces, Silvestre Revueltas' "Sensemaya" (1937-38) and Witold Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra (1950-54), along with the suite Sergei Prokofiev drew from his music to the 1933 Soviet film, "Lieutenant Kije."

Revueltas' best-known piece is a kind of pre-Columbian "Rite of Spring" in miniature, a neo-primitive ritual-music illustrating a poem about the killing of a snake. Its rhythmic ostinato packs a terrific wallop no matter how many times one has heard the score. Prieto built it slowly and steadily, although a brisker reading would have been preferable in this, its belated CSO premiere.

Lutoslawski's orchestral concerto has tended to languish in the shadow of Bela Bartok's masterpiece of the same name, which is a shame since the Polish master's work is a marvelous piece in its own right, richly assured of invention, a cannily crafted workout for every section of the ensemble. In Prieto's carefully controlled but exuberant reading, the CSO's corporate brilliance emerged in full splendor, even if a few details were blurred.

The Prokofiev – last heard at these concerts 37 years ago – benefited from a light, jaunty application of weight and forward motion, also from distinguished solo playing by Christopher Martin on cornet, Michael Henoch on oboe and uncredited guest players Lorna McGhee on flute and the great Timothy McAllister on tenor saxophone.

The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $29-$216. "Welcome Yule!" repeats at 3 p.m. Saturday-Tuesday; $35-$125. 312-294-3000, cso.org.

CSO's Boulez awarded Lifetime Achievement Grammy

What do Pierre Boulez, Buddy Guy, George Harrison and the Bee Gees have in common?

All are 2015 recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy, which bestows the Grammy awards.

Boulez, the eminent composer, conductor and modernist master who is the CSO's conductor emeritus, already has won 26 Grammys for his orchestral, chamber, choral and operatic recordings. His 90th birthday is in March.

The CSO has released a statement in which music director Riccardo Muti congratulated Boulez on behalf of the entire CSO family. It reads, in part:

"You are a giant in the musical world, and we are all so grateful for your great contribution to music. Congratulations, with great admiration, affection and friendship."

The Lifetime Achievement awards will be presented on Feb. 7, the day before the Grammy telecast.

jvonrhein@tribpub.com

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