Mr. West’s approach came fully into focus in the second half of the night, with the album’s most moody and aching songs. At the conclusion of “Bad News,” gunshot noises rang out and Mr. West staggered around the stage, eventually collapsing facedown on the ground as the string section throbbed urgently, almost like a boot on his neck. On “See You in My Nightmares,” he asked for the backing track to be cut so that he could be accompanied by a moping piano.

At the beginning of “Coldest Winter,” about the death of his mother, several women outfitted in ivory sheaths and hijabs wheeled out a slab bearing a woman in repose. Fake snow dropped onto the stage and crowd as Mr. West sat on a large staircase and intensely memorialized his mother.

But the tour de force was “Pinocchio Story,” the album’s final track, and on the record, something of a ramble. “Maybe that was all my fault,” he muses on this song, looking at himself “chasing the American dream” as the cause of his problems.

For this closing number, Mr. West re-emerged encased in burlap from head to toe, like a mummy or walking pincushion, and ambled around the stage. Even though his eyes weren’t visible and he could make only the most cursory of gestures because of the thickness of his outfit, he somehow managed an intense emotional bluntness that was overwhelming. “You’ll never figure out real love,” the song goes, but here, at the end, he shouted, “I feel so much love tonight!”

As an album, “808s” is not without its eccentricities and its missteps — several songs have overlong outros that serve largely as distractions, and at this show, there were some stretches that split the difference between artistic statement and confusion. At one point, during “See You in My Nightmares,” when the music wasn’t going quite how he wanted it, Mr. West joked that the show was “the best dress rehearsal I ever had.” (To that point, when Young Jeezy emerged for his verse on “Amazing,” he was perhaps the only one of the 17,000 or so in attendance who didn’t know all the words.)

As recently as two years ago, Mr. West met an onstage glitch with a bark: “Everybody fired!” But there was none of that fury here. Mr. West’s animating tension has always been the one he feels between pleasing the world and keeping himself safe from its vagaries, between being an entertainer and being the entertainment.

But at his peak, Mr. West can do both at the same time, giving everything while keeping something for himself. Uncharacteristically, this concert was terse — just over an hour, with no non-“808s” material and no encore, though Mr. West did end the night with all of the musicians and performers aligned in an impressive monochromatic row. As they all held hands and took a bow, as if they’d just completed a Broadway production, Mr. West smiled widely, and hugged several of them before walking offstage.