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It wasn’t so long ago that the common perception existed that Antonin Dvorak was a kind of poor man’s Brahms, i.e., a composer who sugarcoated Czech folk tunes and gypsy rhythms with Romanticisms and who would be forever doomed to be second-tier amongst nineteenth-century composers because his music was viewed as derivative. Brahms himself expressed a different view, and is quoted as saying that he would have been “happy to think up themes as good as those that Dvovak had discarded.”  The Chicago Symphony begins a three-week Dvorak retrospective this week under British conductor Sir Mark Elder that is reflective of the intimate relationship that the orchestra has had with the Czech composer’s music virtually since its inception: Dvorak’s “Scherzo capriccioso,” Op. 66, a virtuoso showpiece which opens the festival, was performed during the CSO’s first 1891-1892 season by its founder and first music director, Theodore Thomas, when the piece was less than a decade old; it remained a popular showpiece for the orchestra into the 1940s before falling out of the general repertoire. The other works on the program—the Violin Concerto, performed with popular Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, making her CSO debut, and the Seventh Symphony—remain popular symphonic warhorses but also have long CSO associations: the Orchestra gave the American premiere of the Violin Concerto and one of the first performances of the Seventh—then known as the Second—Symphony back in 1894.  Dvorak’s life-long bout with absent-mindedness was so severe that many of the scores to works that were unpublished in his lifetime were “lost”—i.e., literally, misplaced—including the first four of his symphonies, which gradually came to light one by one decades after Dvorak’s death in 1904, posthumously mandating a renumbering of his symphonic output.  (Dennis Polkow) 

June 4-6, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, (312)294-3000.