BERLIN — When he conducts, Kirill Petrenko presents a paradox: How can an artist so mysteriously shy and monastic offstage manage to steal the spotlight whenever he’s on?

Mr. Petrenko — who is deep into his inaugural season as the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, which he led in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony here on Thursday — doesn’t grant interviews to the press. He only rarely (and reluctantly) releases recordings.

“I prefer,” he once said, “to speak through my work on the podium.”

When he speaks that way, in his conducting, it’s with his entire body. Mr. Petrenko’s face is a private theater for his players — emotive and joyful, with veins on the sides of his forehead that bulge to the tides of musical phrases. He tenses his shoulders, twists his torso and practically crouches in retreat. Whether big or small, his gestures wield uncanny authority; he can remind you of Mickey Mouse in “Fantasia,” able to sculpt the ocean itself with just a scoop of his hand.

Somehow, it works. Look up old videos of Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler, and you’ll see how an approach like this can go wrong: Bernstein looks mannered, overemotional, performatively in search of transcendence. But Mr. Petrenko’s conducting, for all its theatricality, is without pretense. You can trace a clear line from his movements to the character of his orchestra’s sound; the strike of a tightly held fist elicited the chilling beat of a funeral march.