As such ensembles go, the Chiara String Quartet was a bright but relatively brief candle. It gave a farewell concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon, after 18 years of existence and soon after its star turn as quartet in residence at the museum in 2015-16.

In contrast, the Juilliard String Quartet is over 70 years old (with repeated turnover), and the Guarneri Quartet retired in 2009, after 45 years, including its own 43-year residency at the Met. Still, there is much to be said for going out at the top of your game, and the Chiara players — the violinists Rebecca Fischer and Hyeyung Yoon, the violist Jonah Sirota and the cellist Gregory Beaver — seemed to be doing just that, each with a new career path in prospect, though leaving open the possibility of future ad hoc collaborations.

The group, which took up residence also at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2004, always had a taste for adventure, promoting new music and exploring concert formats in shows it called Chamber Music in Any Chamber. During its Met residency, it gave New York premieres of works by Jefferson Friedman and Pierre Jalbert and extended its practice of performing from memory, rare among string quartets, with “Brahms by Heart.”

On Saturday, Chiara opened with a work it introduced in 2011, Nico Muhly’s “Diacritical Marks,” a pleasant series of eight brief interconnected movements. It followed with the New York premiere of Philip Glass’s Piano Quintet (“Annunciation”), with the pianist Paul Barnes.