The Rhode Island Philharmonic ended its season last night with a whimper — a divine whimper — with the final moments from Gustav Mahler’s shimmering Fourth Symphony. This was an elegant, heartfelt performance from conductor Larry Rachleff, whose wife, soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, was on hand to sing about all the joys of heaven in the lilting finale.

Last night’s concert at Veterans Memorial Auditorium wrapped up the orchestra’s regular subscription series. The Philharmonic has a gala scheduled for May 13 with pianist André Watts.

And if there were a theme to the program, it was about music that looked back to more innocent times. Rachleff led off the evening with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which is widely considered the greatest of his neoclassical compositions, although it harks back more to Bach than Mozart.

And the Mahler Fourth, finished in 1901, is the most sparing, the most classically proportioned of the composer’s nine symphonies. It is the shortest of all of them, clocking in at just under an hour, and it employs the smallest orchestra with no offstage trumpets or extra horns.

It has been more than 30 years since the orchestra last played the Stravinsky, and that was with the Brown University Chorus. This time around it was with the fine Providence Singers, who had no problems negotiating the score’s wide melodic leaps and knotty counterpoint. Only in exposed sections did the men sound a little thin.

Stravinsky wrote his Symphony of Psalms in 1930 for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony. And it has unusual scoring, for two pianos and five flutes, but no violins, violas or clarinets. That left just the lower strings which gave the piece a dark cast.

And it’s pretty tough going in places, with lots of chromaticism and at least one angular double fugue that’s taken up in the winds. But at the same time it doesn’t have quite the thrill and rewards of a much more trite piece like Carmina Burana.

No, it was the Mahler that held the rewards, with its lush harmonies and soaring melodies. This is one of Mahler’s sunnier compositions, compared with the death-haunted scores that were to come. But there are hints of the macabre in the scherzo, a sort of dance of death that featured concertmaster Charles Sherba soloing on an out-of-tune violin. The great heart of the piece, though, is the 22-minute third movement that to Mahler represented St. Ursula smiling on the souls that are making their way heavenward.

Cheryl Bishkoff deserves a hand for her haunting oboe solo.

It is the fourth movement that takes us to heaven, or at least a child’s version of paradise. Here Dunn, who sounded so lovely, sang about leading an angelic life as “merry as can be,” and about the endless array of goodies to eat.

It was a stunning performance of a meandering episodic work. But Rachleff managed to hold it all together, to point up the contrasts in the opening movement, and keep the focus taut in the long slow movement, with its high silken strings.

cgray@projo.com