Made to play
Gabriella Swallow remembers the precise moment she understood that music was her destiny.
She was seven years old, lying in bed at the rambling Georgian house (a former hotel) in Lincolnshire where she grew up. All the pupils were expected to learn the recorder, and she vividly remembers the feeling of holding the sheets of music in her hands and “wanting to keep going to the next page and the next... similar to when a kid starts reading books really young and can’t put them down.”
Even at that young age, something in the language of music just made immediate sense to her “in a way that nothing else had done.”
An early calling
Gabriella was, by her own admission, “an unusually musical child”. Her parents were dentists who adored music; her father as an avid fan and convenor of musical talent, and her mother as an accomplished amateur harpsichord player. Gabriella’s mastery of the recorder, “an old instrument”, meant “it felt very natural for my mum to accompany me”, and during those years the house was filled with the sound of Baroque music.
In 1987 though, “my parents lied to me,” laughs Gabriella. Fearing that the available repertoire for recorder was too limited, they suggested she also learn to play a string instrument. When Gabriella chose “the biggest”, her parents bent the truth (the double bass wouldn’t have fit in the family car) and pointed her towards the cello.
1987 was the same the year the celebrated British cellist Jacqueline du Pré died, placing Gabriella among an entire generation of young women who had been inspired by hearing du Pré play Elgar’s Cello Concerto. In addition to finding in her a role model, “We saw that it was possible to form a really profound relationship with an instrument,” she says.
Just one year later Gabriella, now aged nine, auditioned for Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. Though she had planned her audition with the recorder, fortunately the cello was in the trunk of her parents’ car, so when the director of music asked if she could play anything else, she was able to show what she could do. She’d been playing the cello for just one year, but when the director of music heard her, he said, “That’s your instrument.”
Gabriella was granted a spot. She put down her recorder that day and never looked back.
Finding her way
Attending Chetham, a boarding school, meant leaving home and entering an intensely competitive environment of hyper-talented young musicians, many of whom had far more focused experience than Gabriella. Not coming from a musical dynasty, neither she nor her parents understood many of the unwritten rules, and so she simply worked things out as she went – with some help from those around her. Older pupils shared scores and helped her tackle unfamiliar repertoire, and she came to see music as a language that could bridge differences in age and experience.
That experience gave her an understanding of both the opportunities and pressures that specialist musical training can create. It also helped shape her later commitment to music education: not only giving children access to instruments but pushing them to develop their own voices and explore different genres.
“What I try to do is encourage improvisation, trying out different kinds of styles, having the confidence to build a career which is really authentic,” she says.
You feel like a custodian with an older instrument. That cello is going to outlive me, as it’s outlived all the other owners since 1820.
Gabriella Swallow
A lifelong companion
An important milestone came at age 15, when Gabriella visited the London instrument dealer J&A Beare with her father to acquire a cello. Arriving at the shop at roughly the same age as du Pré, who had also found her cello there, carried a particular significance. Gabriella left with a full-sized cello made by Charles Harris Sr in 1820, and that’s the instrument she has played ever since.
The cello has accompanied her through three decades of professional and personal change. It has performed as a solo voice, blended into chamber ensembles and orchestras, and travelled with her through a career spanning classical, jazz, pop and film music. She has toured with Bryan Ferry, worked in Hollywood and performed live film scores, and is currently a member of the 19-piece live orchestra of the award-winning West End production of Jesus Christ Superstar in London’s West End, which runs through January 2027.
The cello “has been there for me since I was a teenager,” she says. “We’ve grown older together, and in many ways, it has grown with me.”
The wood itself is part of that sense of continuity. Gabriella describes it as beautiful and durable: a natural material crafted for a single purpose, one which has already endured for more than two centuries. For Gabriella, possessing an instrument of that age doesn’t feel entirely like ownership – more like stewardship. The cello had a life before her and will have another after her.
“You feel like a custodian with an older instrument,” she says. “That cello is going to outlive me, as it’s outlived all the other owners since 1820.”
Today, Gabriella also plays a five-string electric cello designed for her in New York by instrument maker Mark Wood. “Nothing gives me more pleasure than sometimes blissing between the two,” she says.
The contrast is physical as well as musical: the acoustic is made with maple and spruce wood from old-growth European forests and is bound up with resonance and craft. The electric is made from younger, North American wood and opens a very different relationship with sound. Gabriella can stand and move while playing it, plug it into effects pedals and create sounds far removed from those of a traditional acoustic instrument.
She has brought it with her on rock tours and used it to perform film music, including the score for Terminator 2, in front of live audiences. Recreating a synthesised, computer-generated score on a live instrument becomes an act of interpretation – almost, Gabriella says, like painting. And unlike the acoustic cello, that interpretation does not belong to the musician alone.
With an acoustic instrument, Gabriella produces and hears the resonance directly. The electric cello is different: relatively little sound emerges until it is amplified, so she has to trust a sound engineer to become, as she puts it, “another set of ears”, helping shape what the audience ultimately hears.
“With the electric cello, you literally have a plug. Nothing comes out,” she says. “So then you have to have this other set of ears, which belongs to another human.”
“I love that relationship between what humans can do with processed sound.” she explains. “It's always the human element.”
Two ways to play
That balance between tradition and experimentation, permanence and change, runs through Gabriella’s life. Her acoustic cello connects her to its unknown previous players and to the craftsperson who shaped its wood more than two centuries ago – while her electric instrument opens an evolving world of movement and collaboration.
For Gabriella, that connection is at the root of what ‘Made for Life’ means, and it is one facilitated by her instrument: an object that was lovingly created for a specific purpose and which is durable enough to travel through generations.
“It’s a relationship with something that has been carefully crafted, which has accompanied me throughout my life and has always been there for me,” she says. “Through the ups and downs, whether I believe in my playing or not, it always shows up.”
The cello is not disposable or fleeting. Its wood has already endured for more than 200 years, and Gabriella knows that its story will continue after hers.
“It’s there for longevity,” she says. “And it will last beyond me as well.”
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