FIFTY years ago – 51, come May – a 23-year-old dancer, Paul Taylor, gave a concert of his own pieces. Robert Rauschenberg was his designer, Pina Bausch was among his troupe.

Now, at City Center, the Paul Taylor Dance Company has opened the New York segment of its Golden Anniversary Season, which, appropriately, will visit each of the nation’s 50 states.

Through those 50 years, Taylor, now generally recognized as the world’s greatest living choreographer, has remained as effortlessly fresh as the day after tomorrow; as pure as mountain water and as simple as sin.

This three-week season will offer 19 ballets, embracing the whole spectrum of Taylor’s work, and includes two New York premieres, the first being Taylor’s 121st creation, which kicks off Tuesday’s opening gala.

The title, “Klezmerbluegrass,” tells all, and this joyous Lower East Side hoedown – commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture to honor 350 years of Jewish life in America – is an absolute charmer. Think “Oklahoma!” meets “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Its traditional klezmer and bluegrass music has been arranged by clarinetist Margot Levinson, who played it with a combo called the Klezmer Mountain Boys.

As the insistent beat and triumphant bleat of klezmer take on country airs, the Taylor dancers, led here by Silvia Nevjinsky, Annmaria Mazzini, Michael Trusnovec, Julie Tice and the dazzling, virtuosic Richard Chen See, weave and interweave, perky and languorous by turn, with a wonderfully appealing verve.

After the inventive asymmetry of “Syzygy” – a dance suggestive of jagged jive and bellicose video games – the program ends with a Taylor masterpiece, “Esplanade,” where the dancers gorgeously spill over the stage, running, falling, walking, soaring, sliding and crawling, to a baroque cascade of Bach.

Marvelous.

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PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY

City Center, 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues; (212) 581-1212. Season runs through March 20.