Never long out of the Spanish limelight, the Grand Canaries music director Pedro Halffter is suing his orchestra for 105,000 Euros in what he claims is unpaid wages and expenses.

Halffter has played on through rising musician resentment for 12 years. He took legal action when they tried to oust him and won a shoddy compromise deal, a kind of Half-and-halffter.

The Berlin Senate has approved the final draft of next year’s opera budget.

It amounts to 142 million Euros – give or take £100m – and breaks down as follows:

Staatsoper Unter den Linden 49.5 million

Deutsche Oper 45.8 million

Komische Oper 35.8 million.

A further 1.1 million will go to a foundation for the promotion of opera.

The budget is a slight increase of 2.8 million over 2016.

In England, the Arts Council thinks half as much is far too much to spend on two London opera houses.

Violist Amanda Verner has traded her chair in the Sydney Symphony with Amsterdam violist Jeroen Quint in a six-month job swap.

Apart from the weather, is it much different? And did anyone notice a change in the violas?

Read here.

I am grieving for my friend, the playwright Arnold Wesker, who lit up British theatre from the late 1950s and made a contribution to many other art forms.

I got to know Arnold 25 years ago when he wrote an opera, Caritas, with the composer Robert Saxton, about a girl who was bricked up into a church wall. The opera flopped, but Arnold and I bonded. He was witty, genuine and curious about everything, especially music of which he felt deprived. The works of his later years lacked immediate success but he bore adversity with dignity. His time will come.

Arnold, rest his soul, was 83. He had been suffering from Parkinsons Disease.

After Pinter and Osborne, he was the last of the Angry Young Men.