Mozart — Classical Music for Studying & Focus

Halidon is an Italian classical label that has spent the past decade putting its own recordings on YouTube in three-hour blocks aimed at studying, and this Mozart set is their most-watched by a distance. The selection stays in the even-tempered part of the repertoire — piano concertos, sonatas, serenades — and leaves out the operatic and the dramatic, which is the sensible call for something meant to run behind work.

The "Mozart effect", that 1990s claim about this music measurably raising your IQ, was overstated at the time and has been walked back for years, so read the title as marketing. What holds up is duller and more useful: metrical, predictable, texturally even music does not compete for attention the way vocal or dynamically volatile music does. Three hours of it survives a full working day without you noticing it end.