This is from a talk given in Valparaíso Chile on October 28 2022, at ARCOS arts college. It was streamed live – the original video is still up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/HG5Xcjk16cU?si=Eg_iq9xnF6ndph8Q
A translator was present – I have edited out most of his translating.
The talk was entitled "Being a Cirque du Soleil Musical Director: How to get the job, how to do the job, how to keep the job".
Valparaíso is a couple of hours drive from Santiago, where my show "Quidam" was in 2010, and where (and when) I met my wife (who is in the ARCOS audience). We live in Limache, a small town about half an hour from "Valpo".

Me (when I was the La Perle Musical Director) playing the "Guitar Hero" solo from La Perle's Globe of Death on a 5-string electric mandolin. Originally, an acrobat flew in the air while really playing a guitar. He quit, and was replaced by a rotation of guys pretending to play the guitar while I played this. I made this video so that these fakers could study it and improve their faking. I'm not sure it helped.

This was made for my daughter, who wasn't on tour (Quidam) with me at the time.
The music is by mandolinist Mike Marshall.

This was originally made as part of the audition process for "C2017" (Cirque du Soleil shows are referred to as "C____" before a title is agreed upon.) Fortunately, the gig didn't work out, and I ended up in Dubai creating a Dragone show.
Totally live, zero post-editing, just an iPod Shuffle (with the Cirque audition backup track) and a Yamaha P-80, Y'd into a Sony PCM-D50. Showin' off my Keith Emerson roots!

This is fun to play. There's an orchestra and a choir waiting onstage, and you walk out, sit down at the piano (a beautiful nine-foot Steinway, in this recording), and say what you came there to say (which, in my case, was quite a lot – I'd been informed, moments before I went on, that my maternal grandmother had passed away. She was a great lover of music and literature (she'd read Lord of the Rings six times!), and a big influence on my life. All the inspiration one could ask for!). You get to show off for about three minutes, and then the orchestra comes in, and you get to accompany them (lots of fun for me, being a rock and jazz musician). The choir comes in at the end – the whole thing is like a twenty-minute version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Francis Poulenc's Nocturne Nº 1 in C major, composed in 1929. Recorded at SoundStruck Studios in Dubai, UAE, on March 10, 2019.

Me on mandolin with Sébastien Thériault on guitar, when we were both on tour with Quidam in Shanghai in 2007.
A little hard to see in this video, but check out the mandolin's fretboard: the white notes are the white notes, if you know what I mean :-P (eg play a C on the mandolin, and your finger will be on mother-of-pearl – play an F#, and your finger will be on ebony).