Music: Going Like 60

Music may be for the young at heart, but it is not necessarily made by the young in years. Manhattan had a brilliant mid-season fortnight, with many of the star performers over 60 and showing no signs of giving up:

Pierre Monteux, 79, French-born conductor, shuttled from the Metropolitan Opera, where he led mellow performances of Faust (and will lead Manon and Orfeo this week), to Carnegie Hall and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for three well-played sessions with the Boston Symphony.

Wilhelm Backhaus, 70, returned to the U.S. (he was born in Germany and lives in Switzerland) to give his second postwar all-Beethoven piano recital for a full and cheering house.

Mieczyslaw Horszowski, 62, gave the eleventh recital in his back-breaking series of practically all of Beethoven’s solo piano music.

Dame Myra Hess, 65, gave a standout performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (the one supposedly too heroic for women to attempt) with the Philharmonic-Symphony, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos (a mere 58).

Paul Whiteman, 63, who conducted the world premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, led a rousing Gershwin memorial program (including the Rhapsody) in Carnegie Hall.

Vicente Escudero, sixtyish Spanish dancer (he is not sure about his age), returned to the U.S. with a troupe of young dancers for the first time in 20 years and rapped out his zapateados with such eclat that his show was held over for another two weeks.

Andrés Segovia, 62, the great Spanish guitarist, this week gives a recital in Town Hall.

Benno Moiseiwitsch, 65, appears in Carnegie Hall to play a program of piano classics (Bach-Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann).