The Santa Barbara Symphony continues its 2023/24 season with musical year-end festivities for the community. Guest conductor and host Andrew Lipke is putting the “new” in the Santa Barbara Symphony’s New Year’s Eve celebration with a rousing evening of pop, rock, and Broadway classics, along with familiar classical selections.

The concert is 8:30-10 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 31 at The Granada Theatre, “complete with complimentary champagne and party favors.”

At this point, mere days before the start of 2024, virtually everyone reading this has already determined where they will be at midnight, Dec. 31. Nothing I now say will be an attempt to alter those plans.

It is quite a long evening, however, between finishing dinner and when the bells and booms announce the New Year. Four hours of hard-core partying can wear you out and dilute the big moment. If this is a problem, the symphony’s New Year celebration is an ideal solution.

New Year’s, it seems to me, is at least as much about the year just ending — and even several years before that — as about the one now poised to begin (especially in this case, with 2024 promising nonstop stress and anxiety).

A boisterous, hilarious party is not an ideal venue for reminiscing, especially since the whole point of a party is interacting with other people in an immediate and spontaneous way.

At the Symphony New Year concert, however, we can sit back in the Granada’s comfortable seats, while our attention is drawn away from each other toward the stage and the cornucopia of music pouring forth, and indulge in nostalgic reveries to our hearts’ content. We are among friends, or simply people in a good, relaxed mood.

Tickets to the party start at $55, and are on sale now. They can be purchased in person, at 1330 State St., by calling the Granada Theatre box office, 805-899-2222, or online at www.thesymphony.org.