Instead, this was a typical Kodo evening: a celebration of music, of physicality, of life. But it was delivered with a sort of manic intensity that spoke to the import of the moment more eloquently than any words could have.

This concert was part of the troupe’s “One Earth Tour” of North America, celebrating its 30th anniversary. It was also — notwithstanding the Lincoln Center setting — part of Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival JapanNYC, which swings into its spring segment at a time when the world’s attention is focused on Japan.

Kodo, with its pulsing rhythms, takes its name from a Japanese word that can mean either “heartbeat” or “children of the drum.” The tour performers are part of a larger group based on Sado Island, off the northwest coast of Japan, some 175 miles from Tokyo, and said to have been beyond the earthquake’s reach. Here musical performance is mingled with arduous physical training and everyday life experiences. Despite this relative isolation, Kodo is public-spirited and internationally minded: thus the “one earth” notion, an extension of the idea that a community was once defined by the distance over which the o-daiko, the big drum used in Buddhist and Shinto temples, could be heard. Kodo was, in fact, quick to draw attention to the scope of the recent disaster on its Web site (kodo.or.jp) and extend an appeal for donations to the Red Cross in various nations.

But onstage, there was simply Kodo being Kodo. If you are to perform at all in this uninhibited, athletic style, you can only perform joyously and all-out.

The program — theatrically paced and lighted, and a bit slicker than those remembered from a decade or so ago — consisted mostly of Kodo standards, with a dance element added in the opening “Sakaki,” composed by Masaru Tsuji and choreographed and executed by Kenzo Abe. The first half ended with Maki Ishii’s “Monochrome,” in which a tapping on seven small drums little louder than a buzzing of insects swells into what a swarm of locusts must sound like, before subsiding and giving way to pounding on larger drums.

As always, the big drum came into play near the end, in the traditional “O-Daiko.” Long the province of an elder master, Yoshikazu Fujimoto, the drum was played here by Kenta Nakagome, wielding clublike drumsticks over his head for what seemed an impossibly long time, and then some. The earth shook benignly. Then, as Mr. Fujimoto used to do, Mr. Nakagome threw himself into the final number, the traditional “Yatai-Bayashi,” with scarcely a break.

The encores were generous, in line with the overflowing spirit of the evening.