Eliott Tordo

A film theme, then an investigation

Tordo grew up in Grenoble and came to music through the control room rather than the conservatoire. He worked as a studio engineer, played keyboards and wrote and produced orchestral music — the trade still shows in everything he puts out. In 2016 he heard the erhu, the two-stringed Chinese fiddle with a small snakeskin-faced soundbox and no fingerboard, in a film's theme song, and did not initially know what the instrument was or where it was from. His own explanation of the decision is flatly acoustic: he went to the erhu from a pure liking of the sound.

France had almost nothing to offer in the way of qualified teachers, so what followed was not tuition. He calls it an investigation — working through performance videos, reading online forums, reverse-engineering bow pressure and the sliding, fingerboard-less left hand from recordings, over several years. Promotional material prepared for his Turkish concerts dates the point at which he turned from full-time studio work to the erhu to 2017.

The keyboard and composition background sped the process up and also shaped the result. Tordo has said it pushed his playing towards something more epic and grand than a traditionally trained Chinese player would produce, which is a fair description of the records: long sustained lines over his own orchestral and electronic beds, closer to a film cue than to a teahouse recital.

A catalogue assembled from other people's scores

The released work divides into two piles. The larger one is covers. Three collections titled Anthology, Pt. 1, Pt. 2 and Pt. 3 — nine, seven and six tracks — reached streaming services at the start of 2020. A separate and much bigger Anthology 3 arrived on Bandcamp on 1 August 2023 as a double CD of thirty-six remastered and remixed tracks, gathering every cover he had made over the preceding two years; the two sets share a number but are not the same release. Its contents sketch the repertoire plainly enough: Schindler's List, several Lord of the Rings arrangements, Star Wars, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Big Fish and Begonia, and a reading of The Last Samurai recorded live in Grenoble.

The smaller pile is original writing, and it sits inside the same records rather than apart from them — Haven, Ascending and Prayers to the Winds among them. Tordo has described composing specifically for the instrument as part of his advocacy for it rather than a separate career strand.

The one album-length project with a single subject is The Raven's Path, six tracks drawn from Warhammer 3, released on 27 June 2023. After it came a steady run of singles: Wanderer Theme (Of Solitude Past and Present) on 17 May 2024, Evenstar on 22 June, For the Love of a Princess on 17 August, On the Nature of Daylight on 30 August, and A Time of Quiet Between the Storms on 25 October. Five more — Cherry Blossoms, Moonlight, Silent Moon, A Water Lily (Suiren) and Sad Traveler (Ryoshu) — all landed together on 27 February 2025. Everything goes out through SunTzu Records, which he owns.

China, 2023, and five minutes with a master

The tour he had wanted for seven years happened in November 2023. CGTN Europe, profiling him for a series on French and Chinese cultural exchange, reported a month-long run through twelve major Chinese cities; the Turkish promoter billing for his 2025 concerts puts the figure at fifteen, and the discrepancy has never been reconciled in print.

What Tordo himself singles out from the trip is not the audiences but a meeting with a Chinese erhu master, which he summed up as learning more in five or six minutes than he had in the previous six years. The lesson, by his account, was about stylistic authenticity and the control of intensity — the things hardest to extract from a video.

The teaching runs in the other direction too. He takes students remotely from France, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada and the United States, and describes the lessons as conversational rather than hierarchical. His stated reason for doing any of it is straightforwardly evangelical: eight years ago, searching for the erhu on the western internet returned almost nothing, and he regards having changed that as the point.

Where he stands in November 2026

Tordo's first Turkish concerts were booked for December 2025 by Kınay Entertainment and billed as Erhu ile Bir Rüya — a dream with the erhu. The Istanbul date was 4 December 2025 in the Theatre Hall at the Atatürk Kültür Merkezi in Beyoğlu, doors at 19:00 and music at 20:00; AKM's own listing headlined him as the western master of the erhu. Ankara followed on 6 December 2025 at the CSO Ada Bankkart Mavi Salon at 20:30. At that point his promoters were citing roughly 435,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 100 million views, figures CGTN had earlier described in the hundreds of millions without pinning a number to them.

That first visit has turned into a far bigger second one. A November 2026 Turkish run is on sale across the country's ticketing platforms, with Istanbul taking two separate nights — IF Performance Hall in Beşiktaş and the Hilltown Seyirlik Sahne — alongside Bursa, Konya, Edirne and other cities, at entry prices between roughly 500 and 1,650 lira depending on the hall. Biletix files the shows under traditional music rather than classical.

Two legs of that run have already fallen over. The Mersin date at the Mezitli Kültür Merkezi on 25 November at 20:00 and the Gaziantep date at the Şehit Kamil municipal culture and congress centre on 26 November at 21:00 are both marked cancelled on Biletix. No replacement dates have been announced for either city, and no reason has been published.

The billing and the paper trail

Anyone checking the promotional copy against the catalogue will find it does not match. Turkish press material circulated ahead of the AKM concert lists albums called Silk and Steel from 2019, Echoes of the Dragon from 2021 and Between Worlds from 2023, together with a Best World Fusion Artist prize. None of those titles appear on Tordo's own Bandcamp page, and none appear in his streaming discography, which runs from the 2020 Anthology sets through The Raven's Path and the 2024–25 singles. The award is not documented anywhere beyond that same promotional text.

It is a small thing, but it matters for a musician whose credibility rests on having done the work in public. The verifiable record — a self-taught player, three cover anthologies, a Warhammer album, a couple of dozen singles, a Chinese tour and a teaching practice — is specific and unusual enough without the additions.