Following his First Prize triumph at the 2018 Queen-Elisabeth-Competition, Samuel Hasselhorn has quickly established himself internationally as a versatile artist who is equally at home in the genres of opera, Lied, and oratorio. He was a permanent member of the Vienna State Opera‘s ensemble for two years, where he interpreted the title role in Don Giovanni, Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Belcore (L’elisir d’amore), Harlequin (Ariadne auf Naxos) or Schaunard (La Bohème). At the Staatstheater Nuremberg, he made his role debuts as Pelléas (Pelléas et Mélisande) and Ford (Falstaff). He is esteemed internationally as a lied recitalist, and regularly works with renowned pianists such as Helmut Deutsch, Malcolm Martineau, Ammiel Bushakevitz or Joseph Middleton. Recitals have taken him to the Hamburg State Opera, the Hugo Wolf Academy in Stuttgart, the Theater an der Wien, the Schubertíada or the Wigmore Hall.
Born in Jerusalem, he began playing piano at the age of four. Developing an early love for the art song, Ammiel is internationally recognised as a leading song pianist of his generation and performs regularly at notable venues across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australia. After initial studies in South Africa, where he raised, he furthered his studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” in Leipzig and at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur de Musique in Paris. Ammiel is a prize-winner at numerous competitions, including the Wigmore Hall Competition in London or the International Schubert Competition in Stuttgart. One of the last private students of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, he mentors regularly at Thomas Hampson’s Heidelberg Lied Academy. In addition to his activities as a pianist, Ammiel is also active as a musicologist and specializes in research on Schubert and Wagner.