When Glen Cortese was the conductor at the Manhattan School of Music in the 1990s, the annual highlight of the orchestral season was a performance of a symphony by Gustav Mahler at the Riverside Church, a chance for the students to shine and occasionally be exposed to the rigors and retakes of a CD recording. Faculty has changed there over time, but this season’s standout event occurred on Thursday, as Kenneth Kiesler led a spirited version of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 at John C. Borden Auditorium.

The piece is filled with youthful exuberance or, rather, a good realization of it should reflect the throbbing, anticipatory quality of youth. Judging simply on mood and spirit, this was a superb performance, far the superior to dozens of professional renditions inflicted upon New York audiences over the years. Mahler wrote that the opening notes should not seem like music at all, but rather the sounds of nature. An interesting effect this night was that the house lights did not go down nor the stage lights up until after these first tones had emerged. Mr. Kiesler caught the Upper Austrian folk spirit of this complex music, with its dotted rhythms contrasting with smooth melodic lines, quite well, and his charges responded with dexterous execution.

The conductor was also on board with the notion that Mahler’s special effects should actually be heard. Few maestros give such free rein to their French horn section as he did this night and his largesse paid huge dividends. Numbering nine in total, this group led the charge, free to develop their ghostly and neurasthenic passages clearly and courageously. Some of their music was clearly audible for the first time in memory, and this listener has heard many dozens of live performances of this highly descriptive work.

There were problems, of course. A noticeable lapse in energy haunted the third movement and the finale got sloppy for a while, but overall this was fine music making. When Mr. Kiesler had the radical idea to follow the written instructions in the score (many flaunted maestros do not) and let his aforementioned horns stand at the culmination of the finale — what Norman Del Mar once called “the finest visual effect in all of music” — my heart was in my throat. I’ll take this passionate abandon over a more ginger, ostensibly correct, approach any day.

The evening opened with a work by Igor Stravinsky, a variation on the tune Happy Birthday titled “Greeting Prelude” — my favorite Stravinsky piece, since it only lasts for two minutes. Also on tap was the world premiere of a piece by MSM faculty member Robert Sirota, a symphonic effort called 212. This was just the right sort of endeavor for a student ensemble, containing jazzy elements, lots of percussion, dying quail string effects, and general, cacophonous urbanity. The kids ate it for lunch.

Mahler wrote nine symphonies and a good part of a tenth, but the last that he was able to conduct as a premiere was his eighth, known as “The Symphony of a Thousand.” When the performance was over, he ignored the wild applause and waded into the body of musicians so that he could shake the hand of each and every singer in the youth chorus. Mahler knew that his time on earth was almost over and that it was the younger generation who would carry his message forward. Happily, they are still doing so today.