The City of Birmingham Symphony certainly deserves maximum points for effort in mounting the first ever cycle of Ives symphonies by a British orchestra, but whether the musical results justify the initiative is another matter altogether. Ives's stature as the first great American composer is uncontested, but it's doubtful whether that unclassifiable genius is heard at its best in his symphonies. With the exception of the magnificent Fourth Symphony, his most original large-scale music is to be found in the "holidays" pieces and orchestral sets.

Part of the problem is that two of the four numbered symphonies, are student works; the composition of Nos 1 and 2 overlapped while Ives was studying at Yale. If No 2, which ended the CBSO's all-American programme under Robert Spano on Wednesday, is more involving than its all too well-behaved predecessor, it's only because Ives incorporated into it a number of his favourite popular tunes. The ending - a final flourish of Columbia, Gem of the Ocean capped by a crunching 11-note dissonance - is certainly memorable, but up until that point, melodies such as Bringing in the Sheaves and Camptown Races are just the raw material for rather dogged late-romantic processing à la Brahms or Dvorak.

Spano did his best to bring it to life, but he had much more success in projecting the first half of the programme, which began with players from the orchestra in their other guise as the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in a wonderfully lucid, sinewy account of John Adams's Chamber Symphony. Balancing Adams's teeming textures can be problematic, but Spano never missed a trick.

Musically, though, it was downhill after that. There was another so-called symphony before the Ives - Copland's Organ Symphony, first performed in 1925 with his teacher Nadia Boulanger as soloist. Here, Thomas Trotter was at the keyboard. It's hardly a prepossessing work, and does nothing to contradict one's prejudices (unfair, I'm sure) that if there's anything worse than having to listen to solo organ works, it is having to listen to pieces for organ and orchestra.