Andris Nelsons was hardly known internationally when he arrived in Birmingham in 2008; he leaves now as one of the most exciting and sought-after conductors working today. Over his seven seasons at Symphony Hall, Nelsons has methodically expanded his repertory. Mahler’s symphonies have been very much part of that process, and his final pair of concerts as the CBSO’s music director were devoted to another of them, the Third, with the CBSO Chorus and Youth and Children’s Choruses, and Michaela Schuster as the mezzo soloist.

Some conductors ease their way into what is the longest of all Mahler’s symphonies, but that is not Nelsons’s approach. The CBSO horns delivered the opening theme like a challenge, setting the stage for a performance that bristled with combative energy, and the kind of vivid incident that Nelsons finds in everything he conducts. There was some tendency to compartmentalise things, to micro-manage detail at the expense of the overall symphonic scheme, which mattered more in the 30-minute opening movement than it did in the later ones where Nelsons regularly sought out the sinister undertow to the music, whether in the faster sections of the second, or the nature imagery of the third, despite the escapist dream offered by its offstage posthorn solos.

But the finale was very much all of a piece, and it built to a final, gloriously assured affirmation; the sense that every section of the orchestra was determined to give its music director the best possible send-off was quite obvious.

Before the symphony, Nelsons had conducted the UK premiere of Lakes Awake at Dawn, by his fellow Latvian Eriks Ešenvalds, commissioned jointly by the CBSO and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Setting an English translation of part of a poem by Inga Abele and Ešenvalds’s own compilation of watery images, and juxtaposing largely diatonic choral writing with more adventurous orchestral commentary, it’s a thoroughly effective if unremarkable piece of scene painting. It will be the Mahler, though, that Birmingham will remember as Nelsons’s farewell.

• Repeated at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on 18 June. Box office: 0121-345 0600; and available on BBC iPlayer until 17 July.