This may not be the most tactful time to be celebrating the music of the US, but the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has embarked on a series devoted to composer Charles Ives, performing all the symphonies plus a sprinkling of his other works and associated Americana.

On Tuesday it explored the start of Ives's career with the First Symphony, prefaced by the even earlier, practically prepubescent Variations on America for organ, adroitly played by Carleton Etherington, the organist of Tewkesbury Abbey.

The First Symphony is rarely heard in concert - it was not even included in the BBC's otherwise comprehensive Ives weekend at the Barbican a few years ago - but there are good reasons for that. Ives completed the score while studying with Horatio Parker at Yale University in the late 1890s, and it is a competent, well-made piece of late-romantic symphonic writing, with four conventionally shaped movements, indebted to Dvorak's New World Symphony. (The slow movement even opens with a cor anglais solo over hushed strings.)

The result is blameless, bland and boring. Occasionally (when the strings and woodwind go walkabout at the climax of the slow movement, for instance) there are hints of the real Ives, the composer who had already revealed his radical tendencies in the organ Variations seven years earlier. But the rest is all too obviously the work of a gifted student ensuring that what he wrote would not upset his conservative teachers too much.

Steven Sloane conducted the work with generalised vigour, and no obvious affection, but perhaps that is just his way. He brought the same approach to the New World Symphony, making that music sound confident and bold where Ives's pallid reflection could only ever be timorous.