Gianandrea Noseda has put together quite a line-up for his final three-week home stand of the season with the National Symphony Orchestra. Following last week’s pairing of Schnittke and Shostakovich–the latter’s massive Fourth Symphony, no less–is this week’s equally mammoth Sixth Symphony by Gustav Mahler, heard Thursday evening in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The Italian conductor then finishes up next week with Beethoven’s colossal Missa Solemnis.

Any one of these pieces might have finished the season with a bang, but all three is a statement. Noseda’s forceful, Russian-tinged Mahler has not always satisfied in the symphonies he has led with the NSO to date: last year’s Seventh, the Fifth in 2020, and the First in 2018. The approach suited the implacable Sixth just right, a symphony that rewarded Noseda’s propulsive, knife-blade interpretation from beginning to end.

The first movement opened in urgent haste, with chopped repeated notes in the low strings and crisply martial snare drum. Noseda, as usual, went for maximum energy, mostly ignoring the “ma non troppo” part of the tempo marking. This heightened the contrast of the tender second theme, prepared by soft, floating woodwinds before the violins soared on the arching melody supposedly associated with Mahler’s wife, Alma, at least according to her.

Fiery attacks continued in the development section of this long movement, with snarling low strings, blaring trumpets, trilling woodwinds, and booms of the gong. The first intrusion of the cowbells, a distant clanging heard from offstage with ghostly celesta chimes, gave the sense of what Mahler said he wanted, a sound representing “the last earthly sounds heard from the valley below by the departing spirit on the mountain top.” Noseda returned to the driving march music like a man possessed, awakening the longing strings and incendiary brass.

The last time the NSO played the Sixth Symphony, back in 2008, Leonard Slatkin chose to perform the inner movements in the order Andante-Scherzo, reflecting the change that Mahler preferred in performance. Noseda reverted to the composer’s original ordering—and the most often performed order— of Scherzo-Andante. That only increased the dramatic tension of the symphony’s first half, as the pulsating verve of the first movement continued in the equally exciting Scherzo.

At times, Noseda and the musicians allowed the Scherzo to become more dance-like, particularly in the Trio section, which could have been more whimsical and old-fashioned. The second time the Trio music came around, it felt slower, with a little more rubato caressing, a nice touch. In the more folksy secondary section and elsewhere, Noseda gyrated on the podium in a physical display of the uneven meters that crossed and encircled one another.

The only moment of real repose all evening was the tender slow movement, with its main theme derived from Mahler’s own song cycle Kindertotenlieder, which he was working on around the same time. Luscious strings wrapped woodwind lines in warm sound, an especially poignant solo from the English horn. The set of cowbells played onstage in this movement lost some of the mystery compared to the offstage version, clunkier in sound.

Mahler-obsessed readers will be happy to learn that, in keeping with his propensity for maximum melodrama, Noseda performed the gargantuan final movement with all three of the devastating hammer-blows that crush the symphony’s unnamed hero, the last one “felling him like a tree,” as Alma memorably put it. The hammer and whatever it struck were hidden from view until the percussionist lifted the sledge-hammer just before each blow. The sound it produced was mostly what Mahler demanded: not metallic and dull, if perhaps too resonant.

Deep bells, as if tolling in the distance, accompanied the brass-heavy funeral march that opened the Finale. The cowbells returned, again heard offstage, evoking the world beyond, with Noseda driving the faster sections with furious pacing, maximizing the intensity of the music, especially the brass theme of a major chord mutating to minor. As the music struggled to turn toward a major-key apotheosis, each of the three hammer blows put an end to it. After the last strike, with the sonic life blood trickling through the low instruments, a huge minor chord sealed the hero’s fate.

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This was quite a program chosen as the last for retiring assistant principal cellist Glenn Garlick. A touching tribute presentation noted that this dedicated musician has played some 6,600 concerts over his 45 years with the NSO. Hired by Mstislav Rostropovich and appointed assistant principal by Leonard Slatkin, he has played under Christoph Eschenbach and now Noseda. His presence in the front row will be missed.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. kennedy-center.org

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