Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve filled a swath of the relative quiet at the end of the musical year with a sizable recording: Lucas Debargue’s four-disc, four-hour survey of 52 Scarlatti keyboard sonatas for Sony Classical.

It may not have the truly awesome proportions of a Beethoven sonata cycle (10 hours of music in Igor Levit’s new rendition, also for Sony). But Mr. Debargue’s recent release is one of the more sprawling helpings on record of Scarlatti’s hundreds of lucid, elegant sonatas, which generally find themselves on recital programs as shapely amuse-bouches rather than the full meal.