Had baseball sage Branch Rickey been alive to hear the concert by the training ensemble known as the New World Symphony on Tuesday evening at Carnegie Hall, he would have been delighted. Rickey used to state that there were three types of mistakes: errors of commission, errors of omission, and errors of enthusiasm. For the first two he had little tolerance, but he relished players who were guilty of the third. They would grow into winners.

There were a number of such enthusiastic miscues at this concert and they served only to emphasize the high technical quality of the individual practitioners. Let’s be clear from the outset: This is not a youth orchestra and these are not children. Rather this is the last amateur stop on the journey leading to a professional career. To evaluate these fine musicians with anything but the highest standards would be patronizing.

Without question, Michael Tilson Thomas should be praised to the skies for exerting so much effort into musical education. This ensemble, however, has adopted the same bad habits as his San Francisco Symphony. Its performances are ridiculously loud and blaring and dwell only on the surface of the music. Young people love to play at high volume. For Mr. Thomas to be their enabler is disturbing.

This all-Shostakovich program began with three selections from the ballet “The Golden Age,” intoned at a decibel level that would be outlawed in the United Kingdom. More than a few people seated near me had to resort to placing their fingers into their ears in order to survive. The pieces were mercifully short and offered with a great deal of panache, but the experience as a whole was painful.

It was impossible not to think of the ailing Mstislav Rostropovich this evening, not just because he was one of the truly great Shostakovich conductors, but specifically because Yo-Yo Ma appeared as the soloist in the Cello Concerto No. 2 written for Slava. Mr. Ma seemed unfamiliar with the piece, staring at the printed score intently as he sawed away assiduously. The physical pages were somewhat recalcitrant, causing Mr. Thomas to hold Mr. Ma’s music with one hand while conducting with the other.

And there were volume problems here as well. Mr. Ma is a graceful, elegant cellist, but this work is written for a more percussive player. At certain high volume points, the smallish New Worlders simply drowned out their distinguished guest.

After so much unapologetic, thorny modernism, Mr. Ma offered an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s familiar Andante cantabile as both an encore and an act of contrition. He seemed to be saying to the audience, “You will like this better.” At intermission, two highly respected critics left the hall.

There was indeed a lot to like in the realization of the Symphony No. 5, notably an Allegretto of stunning precision and dramatic power that put many older ensembles to shame, and individual efforts by concertmaster and solo hornist that were heartmeltingly beautiful and intelligently phrased. But overall this rendition suffered from architectural imbalance.

Mr. Thomas blew away the first movement with his signature loudness, quickly painting himself into the corner of having nowhere to go but downhill. The Largo is much softer music, but was marred by rather exaggerated emoting. Mr. Thomas learned from Leonard Bernstein and has never been totally able to shake his mentor’s penchant for schmaltzy phrasing. The blended string sound of this orchestra is really quite thin, for a very good reason. It takes years to develop a beautiful aggregate and, by the group’s nature, the best of the New World players are those who leave soonest.

Living by the sword, the brass section totally gave out by the finale, producing some of the worst intonation of the evening. The opening chord was a “bells-up” disaster from which they did not recover. The ending of the piece was wonderfully deliberate and slow, but would have been much more effective with just a soupçon of restraint.