More than a decade after saying he had written his final theatre piece, the chance to compose a work for and about students has lured Peter Maxwell Davies back to opera. Kommilitonen! – "fellow students" is the best translation, though Young Blood is the alternative title – is a joint commission between the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School in New York, where it will receive its US premiere in November.

David Pountney's multistranded libretto counterpoints the story of James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black student to register at the University of Mississippi, with the chronicle of the Weisse Rose, a group of Munich students executed in 1943 for protesting against Nazi atrocities, and an incident from China's cultural revolution when the children of an education minister were forced to denounce their parents.

Pountney also directs the immaculate RAM staging, with designs by Robert Innes Hopkins and puppets by Blind Summit Theatre. It commutes effortlessly between the narratives, Davies's music delineating each strand with remarkable clarity. His score is extraordinarily fluent: the vocal lines are perfectly judged and the instrumental writing full of wonderful touches, with marching band, jazz trio, solo harp and erhu players on stage. It is as good as any theatre score he has ever composed.

The RAM students under Jane Glover are remarkable, too. The chorus works tirelessly; the main roles are double cast, but on the first night Marcus Farnsworth as Meredith, Aoife Miskelly as the student Sophie Scholl and John-Owen Miley-Read as the Gestapo's Grand Inquisitor all demand special mention.