In “Mahler on the Couch,” director Percy Adlon’s hit at last month’s German Film Festival, viewers were given a cinematic glimpse of the anxieties and marital discord in the life of composer Gustav Mahler, as revealed in his clinical visit to Sigmund Freud in the summer of 1910. Maestro Jahja Ling and the San Diego Symphony offered a different, but certainly not incompatible, take on Mahler Friday (Nov. 11) at Copley Symphony Hall, with a performance of Mahler’s “Ninth Symphony,” the composer’s final symphony, completed in 1909 during the psychological taumas that sent him to Dr. Freud’s couch.

Mahler’s sprawling, 80-minute “Ninth Symphony” is part meditation on mortality, part hymn to bucolic splendors, and arguably the composer’s musical farewell. He did not live long enough to hear its Vienna premiere in 1912, and the work was quite slow to gain acceptance. But beginning in the 1930s, it has come into its own and has been recorded over 100 times. Indeed, few contemporary conductors can resist the allure of putting their interpretive stamp on this symphonic behemoth.

I am happy to report that Ling and the orchestra gave a persuasive account of the Ninth, undaunted by its Joycean stream-of-conscious organization and its lack of triumphal full-orchestra climaxesthat can bring an audience to its feet. Ling never lost the sense of urgency that propels the symphony—that cosmic urgency that Mahler felt when his physicians discovered in 1908 a lesion on his heart that prophetically numbered his days—without sacrificing the tranquility of the many time-suspending vignettes that dominate the score. The goal of the symphony—it concludes with a whisper, not a bang—was never in doubt, and at its conclusion Ling appeared to be especially gratified with the orchestra’s response to a score it had never previously performed.

Certainly it was a winning concert for the orchestra’s woodwinds: their wry Ländler that opens the second movement crackled with rhythmic precision and aptly sardonic attitude. An army of clarinets (well, there were only five—they just seemed like a whole brigade) from the high E-flat clarinet to the growling bass clarinet fielded many solo forays with panache, and Acting Principal Flute Martha Aarons offered expressive solos and duos in her turn. Principal Horn Benjamin Jaber did much of the heavy lifting throughout the symphony, both in his solo function and leading his muscular section. Mahler attached great—even mystical—significance to this instrument—and Jaber’s first-movement solos in particular embodied that poignant Romantic longing that Mahler expressed so consummately. If his tone throughout the work was not always sumptuous, his accuracy was impeccable.

Like most composers, Mahler was sensitive to unfavorable critical evaluation of his technical skills—his complaining contemporary Viennese journalists felt no need to be diplomatic—so the brash, even astounding extended third-movement fugue is usually taken as a bravura reproof to the complainers of my profession. Ling took command of this snarly counterpoint and gleefully polished these angular, percussive motifs into a shattering tour de force that was for me the high point of the evening.

While the winds and brass sections occupy much of the composer’s exclusive attention, Mahler gives ample opportunity for the strings to play without competition from their colleagues seated behind them. San Diego’s string sections were at their sonorous best in their quiet, ruminative moments, notably throughout the final movement. Their color was less pleasing as their dynamic level increased, and the opening unison theme of the finale revealed a hard edge that no self-respecting Viennese orchestra would aim for.

If this “Ninth Symphony” performance did not quite measure up to Ling’s authoritative interpretation of Mahler’s epic symphonic work “Das Lied von der Erde” in November, 2009, it nevertheless marks a continuing maturity of the orchestra’s skill to negotiate more complex challenges than the flamboyant, audience-pleasing scores of Strauss and Respighi.

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