Russians are traditionally generous in matters of the heart, and there was a certain nonchalance attaching to sexual licence. When Wilde was imprisoned in 1895, the Russian press was outraged by the brutality of the sentence. Only Kuzmin was honest and specific in his approach, writing without guilt, self-loathing or dissimulation.
His openness was partly due to strength of character but also to the nature of pre-revolutionary Russian society. The great literary precedents in male same-sex eroticism are, of course, Plato’s Symposium, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the samurai tales of Japan. More recently, Verlaine and Rimbaud in France and the Pater/Wilde/Beardsley group in England began to confront the post-Renaissance taboo.
With Kuzmin’s generation came the great wave of homosexual European writers: Proust, Gide, Lorca, Cavafy, Thomas Mann, Musil, Firbank, Forster, all of whom adopted smokescreens of varying thickness.

Indeed he could claim to be the first in any literature of modern times. ¤0 (Harvard University Press, £30.95)

¤0 (Harvard University Press, £30.95)

Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936) is described on the book’s jacket as “Russia’s first openly gay writer”. The brass took the cheers, though their sense of dynamic seemed pretty brash to me. It was the strings, and Matthias Bamert, who had earned them.. Not a screaming skull, but an inspired one.
Peter Hill, the CBSO’s sympathetic tympanist, ensured every crucial link in the “Emperor” was acutely, sensitively controlled. An opening whiff of rhythmically lax woodwind was atoned for by the solo flute and oboe interchange that followed, plus the triple woodwind playing (including three enchanted oboe solos) in Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, whose final Adagio seemed suitably searing for a city in mourning – before the replay was announced – for Aston Villa’s Cup demise earlier in the week.

He has a Midas touch with it, too.
The chemistry worked here, too. Hamelin was mesmerising: not just in endless tiny pianissimo details, but in the way he yielded up the whole gamut of Beethoven moods – febrile, fickle, fey, inquisitive, insistent, jokey, puzzled, surprised, declamatory.
The CBSO team under Bamert had honed much in rehearsal: microscopic ritenuti; a whisper of inverted cello counterpoint, lightly marcato-ed; the twitchy viola figure heralding the Allegro’s recapitulation (with some inspired pizzicato in the three upper strings to follow); or an alluring, infinitesimal pianissimo prised from seven double basses Bamert’s baton work is minute and precise If his face is sombre, at key moments the eyes twinkle. Bamert’s talents, happily free of a lubricious publicity machine, are legion. The non-mainstream repertoire he dares bring before the public with his London Mozart Players and or with full-size orchestras (on Chandos) ranges from Vanhal and Pleyel to Parry, Frank Martin and Patrick (Paddy) Hadley. At 38, his ample frame is contained; comfortable, but not shambling. He has a kind of osmosis with conductors (the one moment where he looked up brought a marked loss of tension).