The two sides are getting ready to face off again.

The musicians have been locked out for more than two months. They have given ground on all key points, including a reluctant agreement to accept present player levels at 76 for the time being.

But the WAC and ASO just keep pressing for more.

A new federal mediator, Richard Giacolone, is flying in today and there is hope the gaps can be bridged, allowing play to resume with a scheduled Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony next week.

But the orchestra and arts center boards are just happy to tough it out longer. Their plan, says violist Paul Murphy, president of the ASO Players’ Association, ‘would reduce us to a small-town orchestra.’

According to the annual Forbes survey, Ten female artists raked in more than $20 million in a year when the media bemoaned what it said would be the last platinum-selling record – made by Taylor Swift.

It’s all changing. The money’s not in records any more. It’s in music.

The death has been announced of Manitas de Plata, friend of Cocteau, Picasso, Dali and Brigitte Bardot, who once topped the season’s bill at Carnegie Hall and sold 93 million records.

A gypsy of Spanish origin he was born in a caravan in the south of France under the name Ricardo Baliardo.

The pianist will receive a major German media award, nationally televised from the Potsdamer Platz, on November 13.

He will share the award with the entertainer Helene Fischer, the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark. (Maybe one of them could speak up for the orchestra her government is abolishing.)

The Senate of Berlin has voted to increase public subsidy to the city’s opera house by 14.5 million Euros, to a total 135.3 million for the years 2015 to 2018.

The reason, it said, was to keep them internationally competitive.

The money is divided between the Deutsche Oper (43.8m), the Staatsoper (47.4m), the Komische Oper (34.3m) and the state ballet (8.5m).

Much of the increase will be swallowed up by high social costs on an payroll of 1,900 personnel.