Just a month to go and Brighton Festival is with us again.

In its 37th year, it is now shaping up into being a mature, focused and distinctive celebration of the arts it has never quite managed to be in the past.

For the reality is that size is not important. While it may still boast of being the biggest arts festival in England, it is the quality of its work which will define Brighton Festival's future.

It has been fascinating to watch the progress of Brighton Festival's chief executive Nick Dodds, delicately picking his way through the minefield of local politics to garner support for his new ideas.

He has spent the first 18 months of his time here putting together the right team of people to take the festival in the direction he wants.

Working with the chairman Sir Michael Checkland, he has built up more commercial backing, more Brighton and Hove Council approval, more South East Arts support and more public enthusiasm than any of his predecessors.

While he came from the Edinburgh Festival as an administrative rather than an arts director, all that is about to change.

He appointed Nigel Hinds as an associate artistic director with a six-strong programming team, but he is about to start flexing his own muscles as well. He wants more artistic involvement himself.

He plans to spend more time travelling during the year, in Britain and abroad, to help find performers of the right calibre, able to generate the level of excitement he demands for Brighton.

When Nick Dodds first arrived in the city, I suggested to him the festival needed fining down, perhaps even transforming into a one-discipline theatre festival.

While he was not prepared to go that far, he has certainly focused on the need for more theatre, believing, rightly, that this is what Brighton especially likes. And probably more than 80 per cent of festival audiences come from within the city.

Which is why the theatre content of the festival programme is particularly strong this year, and will continue to be.

Even more importantly, he sees Brighton as an increasingly important production centre. Indeed, the hunt is on to find an executive producer to run a Made in Brighton operation of commissioned and collaborative works involving both the commercial and subsidised sectors.

Now South East Arts has moved its headquarters to Brighton as well, it becomes part of a telling artistic renaissance for the city.

Music, which of course is where the Brighton Festival first started, remains a hugely important ingredient.

While it may be invidious to pick out any event from the three-week long programme, I have no doubt the most emotional evening for many years will be at the Dome on May 16 when the City of London Sinfonia performs Britten's War Requiem.

With this production created specially for the festival, its resonance with the Iraqi conflict makes it a compelling, overwhelming event.