An enjoyable, if not very profound, bit of Americana

All-American orchestral concerts are rare enough that one is tempted to read each occurrence as a grand cultural statement rather than as an evening of innocent music-making.

By the latter standard, the New West Symphony’s American-themed concert, Saturday at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, was an enjoyable, easygoing romp, and thankfully spiked with Leonard Bernstein’s captivating “Serenade.” By more serious considerations, the program unfairly painted American music as a fairly dull place, hungry for feel-good sentiments and suspicious of intellectual pursuits.

In New West tradition, the concert kicked off with all standing for the national anthem, a habit more relevant than usual here. It may seem a brave gesture to open with music of the great American iconoclast Charles Ives. But when the piece is his “Variations on ‘America,’ ” a lark written for organ in 1892 and orchestrated by William Schuman in 1963, the real Ives isn’t exactly represented. It has a toy-like tameness, compared with later work.

The program’s highlight was Bernstein’s “Serenade” for strings, percussion and violin soloist. Conductor Boris Brott led the pared-down ensemble with spit, wit and polish, and its solo part was played with sumptuous poise and energy by Cho-Liang Lin. Written in 1954, amid Bernstein’s successes in musical theater, the work neatly balances his concert music ambitions and aspects of his life on Broadway. In addition to more dissonant asides, its dramatic sweeps, jazz-tilting harmonies and rhythmic urbanity look ahead to his later theatrical piece de resistance, “West Side Story.”

After intermission, the going got lean. Virgil Thomson’s sweet suite from the Depression-era film “The Plow That Broke the Plains” came equipped with narration from the film, a distraction booming over the sound system. As such, Thomson’s score sounds especially quaint and pictorial, just shy of kitsch. The closer was “Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture,” arranged by Robert Russell Bennett, and a reduction of Gershwin’s masterpiece to a pops-like structure.

Throughout, at least, the New West played with its customary care and aplomb.